What is Man?

and other essays

Mark Twain

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What is Man?

I

a. Man the Machine. b. Personal Merit

(The Old Man and the Young Man had been conversing. The Old Man had asserted that the human being is merely a
machine, and nothing more. The Young Man objected, and asked him to go into particulars and furnish his reasons for his
position.)

Old Man. What are the materials of which a steam-engine is made?

Young Man. Iron, steel, brass, white-metal, and so on.

O.M. Where are these found?

Y.M. In the rocks.

O.M. In a pure state?

Y.M. No — in ores.

O.M. Are the metals suddenly deposited in the ores?

Y.M. No — it is the patient work of countless ages.

O.M. You could make the engine out of the rocks themselves?

Y.M. Yes, a brittle one and not valuable.

O.M. You would not require much, of such an engine as that?

Y.M. No — substantially nothing.

O.M. To make a fine and capable engine, how would you proceed?

Y.M. Drive tunnels and shafts into the hills; blast out the iron ore; crush it, smelt it, reduce it to pig-iron; put
some of it through the Bessemer process and make steel of it. Mine and treat and combine several metals of which brass
is made.

O.M. Then?

Y.M. Out of the perfected result, build the fine engine.

O.M. You would require much of this one?

Y.M. Oh, indeed yes.

O.M. It could drive lathes, drills, planers, punches, polishers, in a word all the cunning machines of a great
factory?

Y.M. It could.

O.M. What could the stone engine do?

Y.M. Drive a sewing-machine, possibly — nothing more, perhaps.

O.M. Men would admire the other engine and rapturously praise it?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. But not the stone one?

Y.M. No.

O.M. The merits of the metal machine would be far above those of the stone one?

Y.M. Of course.

O.M. Personal merits?

Y.M. PERSONAL merits? How do you mean?

O.M. It would be personally entitled to the credit of its own performance?

Y.M. The engine? Certainly not.

O.M. Why not?

Y.M. Because its performance is not personal. It is the result of the law of construction. It is not a MERIT that it
does the things which it is set to do — it can’t HELP doing them.

O.M. And it is not a personal demerit in the stone machine that it does so little?

Y.M. Certainly not. It does no more and no less than the law of its make permits and compels it to do. There is
nothing PERSONAL about it; it cannot choose. In this process of “working up to the matter” is it your idea to work up
to the proposition that man and a machine are about the same thing, and that there is no personal merit in the
performance of either?

O.M. Yes — but do not be offended; I am meaning no offense. What makes the grand difference between the stone engine
and the steel one? Shall we call it training, education? Shall we call the stone engine a savage and the steel one a
civilized man? The original rock contained the stuff of which the steel one was built — but along with a lot of sulphur
and stone and other obstructing inborn heredities, brought down from the old geologic ages — prejudices, let us call
them. Prejudices which nothing within the rock itself had either POWER to remove or any DESIRE to remove. Will you take
note of that phrase?

Y.M. Yes. I have written it down; “Prejudices which nothing within the rock itself had either power to remove or any
desire to remove.” Go on.

O.M. Prejudices must be removed by OUTSIDE INFLUENCES or not at all. Put that down.

Y.M. Very well; “Must be removed by outside influences or not at all.” Go on.

O.M. The iron’s prejudice against ridding itself of the cumbering rock. To make it more exact, the iron’s absolute
INDIFFERENCE as to whether the rock be removed or not. Then comes the OUTSIDE INFLUENCE and grinds the rock to powder
and sets the ore free. The IRON in the ore is still captive. An OUTSIDE INFLUENCE smelts it free of the clogging ore.
The iron is emancipated iron, now, but indifferent to further progress. An OUTSIDE INFLUENCE beguiles it into the
Bessemer furnace and refines it into steel of the first quality. It is educated, now — its training is complete. And it
has reached its limit. By no possible process can it be educated into GOLD. Will you set that down?

O.M. There are gold men, and tin men, and copper men, and leaden mean, and steel men, and so on — and each has the
limitations of his nature, his heredities, his training, and his environment. You can build engines out of each of
these metals, and they will all perform, but you must not require the weak ones to do equal work with the strong ones.
In each case, to get the best results, you must free the metal from its obstructing prejudicial ones by education —
smelting, refining, and so forth.

Y.M. You have arrived at man, now?

O.M. Yes. Man the machine — man the impersonal engine. Whatsoever a man is, is due to his MAKE, and to the
INFLUENCES brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, COMMANDED,
by EXTERIOR influences — SOLELY. He ORIGINATES nothing, not even a thought.

Y.M. Oh, come! Where did I get my opinion that this which you are talking is all foolishness?

O.M. It is a quite natural opinion — indeed an inevitable opinion — but YOU did not create the materials out of
which it is formed. They are odds and ends of thoughts, impressions, feelings, gathered unconsciously from a thousand
books, a thousand conversations, and from streams of thought and feeling which have flowed down into your heart and
brain out of the hearts and brains of centuries of ancestors. PERSONALLY you did not create even the smallest
microscopic fragment of the materials out of which your opinion is made; and personally you cannot claim even the
slender merit of PUTTING THE BORROWED MATERIALS TOGETHER. That was done AUTOMATICALLY— by your mental machinery, in
strict accordance with the law of that machinery’s construction. And you not only did not make that machinery yourself,
but you have NOT EVEN ANY COMMAND OVER IT.

Y.M. This is too much. You think I could have formed no opinion but that one?

O.M. Spontaneously? No. And YOU DID NOT FORM THAT ONE; your machinery did it for you — automatically and instantly,
without reflection or the need of it.

Y.M. Suppose I had reflected? How then?

O.M. Suppose you try?

Y.M. (AFTER A QUARTER OF AN HOUR.) I have reflected.

O.M. You mean you have tried to change your opinion — as an experiment?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. With success?

Y.M. No. It remains the same; it is impossible to change it.

O.M. I am sorry, but you see, yourself, that your mind is merely a machine, nothing more. You have no command over
it, it has no command over itself — it is worked SOLELY FROM THE OUTSIDE. That is the law of its make; it is the law of
all machines.

Y.M. Can’t I EVER change one of these automatic opinions?

O.M. No. You can’t yourself, but EXTERIOR INFLUENCES can do it.

Y.M. And exterior ones ONLY?

O.M. Yes — exterior ones only.

Y.M. That position is untenable — I may say ludicrously untenable.

O.M. What makes you think so?

Y.M. I don’t merely think it, I know it. Suppose I resolve to enter upon a course of thought, and study, and
reading, with the deliberate purpose of changing that opinion; and suppose I succeed. THAT is not the work of an
exterior impulse, the whole of it is mine and personal; for I originated the project.

O.M. Not a shred of it. IT GREW OUT OF THIS TALK WITH ME. But for that it would not have occurred to you. No man
ever originates anything. All his thoughts, all his impulses, come FROM THE OUTSIDE.

Y.M. It’s an exasperating subject. The FIRST man had original thoughts, anyway; there was nobody to draw from.

O.M. It is a mistake. Adam’s thoughts came to him from the outside. YOU have a fear of death. You did not invent
that — you got it from outside, from talking and teaching. Adam had no fear of death — none in the world.

Y.M. Yes, he had.

O.M. When he was created?

Y.M. No.

O.M. When, then?

Y.M. When he was threatened with it.

O.M. Then it came from OUTSIDE. Adam is quite big enough; let us not try to make a god of him. NONE BUT GODS HAVE
EVER HAD A THOUGHT WHICH DID NOT COME FROM THE OUTSIDE. Adam probably had a good head, but it was of no sort of use to
him until it was filled up FROM THE OUTSIDE. He was not able to invent the triflingest little thing with it. He had not
a shadow of a notion of the difference between good and evil — he had to get the idea FROM THE OUTSIDE. Neither he nor
Eve was able to originate the idea that it was immodest to go naked; the knowledge came in with the apple FROM THE
OUTSIDE. A man’s brain is so constructed that IT CAN ORIGINATE NOTHING WHATSOEVER. It can only use material obtained
OUTSIDE. It is merely a machine; and it works automatically, not by will-power. IT HAS NO COMMAND OVER ITSELF, ITS
OWNER HAS NO COMMAND OVER IT.

Y.M. Well, never mind Adam: but certainly Shakespeare’s creations —

O.M. No, you mean Shakespeare’s IMITATIONS. Shakespeare created nothing. He correctly observed, and he marvelously
painted. He exactly portrayed people whom GOD had created; but he created none himself. Let us spare him the slander of
charging him with trying. Shakespeare could not create. HE WAS A MACHINE, AND MACHINES DO NOT CREATE.

Y.M. Where WAS his excellence, then?

O.M. In this. He was not a sewing-machine, like you and me; he was a Gobelin loom. The threads and the colors came
into him FROM THE OUTSIDE; outside influences, suggestions, EXPERIENCES (reading, seeing plays, playing plays,
borrowing ideas, and so on), framed the patterns in his mind and started up his complex and admirable machinery, and IT
AUTOMATICALLY turned out that pictured and gorgeous fabric which still compels the astonishment of the world. If
Shakespeare had been born and bred on a barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no
OUTSIDE MATERIAL to work with, and could have invented none; and NO OUTSIDE INFLUENCES, teachings, moldings,
persuasions, inspirations, of a valuable sort, and could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced
nothing. In Turkey he would have produced something — something up to the highest limit of Turkish influences,
associations, and training. In France he would have produced something better — something up to the highest limit of
the French influences and training. In England he rose to the highest limit attainable through the OUTSIDE HELPS
AFFORDED BY THAT LAND’S IDEALS, INFLUENCES, AND TRAINING. You and I are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we
can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobelins.

Y.M. And so we are mere machines! And machines may not boast, nor feel proud of their performance, nor claim
personal merit for it, nor applause and praise. It is an infamous doctrine.

O.M. It isn’t a doctrine, it is merely a fact.

Y.M. I suppose, then, there is no more merit in being brave than in being a coward?

O.M. PERSONAL merit? No. A brave man does not CREATE his bravery. He is entitled to no personal credit for
possessing it. It is born to him. A baby born with a billion dollars — where is the personal merit in that? A baby born
with nothing — where is the personal demerit in that? The one is fawned upon, admired, worshiped, by sycophants, the
other is neglected and despised — where is the sense in it?

Y.M. Sometimes a timid man sets himself the task of conquering his cowardice and becoming brave — and succeeds. What
do you say to that?

O.M. That it shows the value of TRAINING IN RIGHT DIRECTIONS OVER TRAINING IN WRONG ONES. Inestimably valuable is
training, influence, education, in right directions — TRAINING ONE’S SELF-APPROBATION TO ELEVATE ITS IDEALS.

Y.M. But as to merit — the personal merit of the victorious coward’s project and achievement?

O.M. There isn’t any. In the world’s view he is a worthier man than he was before, but HE didn’t achieve the change
— the merit of it is not his.

Y.M. Whose, then?

O.M. His MAKE, and the influences which wrought upon it from the outside.

Y.M. His make?

O.M. To start with, he was NOT utterly and completely a coward, or the influences would have had nothing to work
upon. He was not afraid of a cow, though perhaps of a bull: not afraid of a woman, but afraid of a man. There was
something to build upon. There was a SEED. No seed, no plant. Did he make that seed himself, or was it born in him? It
was no merit of HIS that the seed was there.

Y.M. Well, anyway, the idea of CULTIVATING it, the resolution to cultivate it, was meritorious, and he originated
that.

O.M. He did nothing of the kind. It came whence ALL impulses, good or bad, come — from OUTSIDE. If that timid man
had lived all his life in a community of human rabbits, had never read of brave deeds, had never heard speak of them,
had never heard any one praise them nor express envy of the heroes that had done them, he would have had no more idea
of bravery than Adam had of modesty, and it could never by any possibility have occurred to him to RESOLVE to become
brave. He COULD NOT ORIGINATE THE IDEA— it had to come to him from the OUTSIDE. And so, when he heard bravery extolled
and cowardice derided, it woke him up. He was ashamed. Perhaps his sweetheart turned up her nose and said, “I am told
that you are a coward!” It was not HE that turned over the new leaf — she did it for him. HE must not strut around in
the merit of it — it is not his.

Y.M. But, anyway, he reared the plant after she watered the seed.

O.M. No. OUTSIDE INFLUENCES reared it. At the command — and trembling — he marched out into the field — with other
soldiers and in the daytime, not alone and in the dark. He had the INFLUENCE OF EXAMPLE, he drew courage from his
comrades’ courage; he was afraid, and wanted to run, but he did not dare; he was AFRAID to run, with all those soldiers
looking on. He was progressing, you see — the moral fear of shame had risen superior to the physical fear of harm. By
the end of the campaign experience will have taught him that not ALL who go into battle get hurt — an outside influence
which will be helpful to him; and he will also have learned how sweet it is to be praised for courage and be huzza’d at
with tear-choked voices as the war-worn regiment marches past the worshiping multitude with flags flying and the drums
beating. After that he will be as securely brave as any veteran in the army — and there will not be a shade nor
suggestion of PERSONAL MERIT in it anywhere; it will all have come from the OUTSIDE. The Victoria Cross breeds more
heroes than —

Y.M. Hang it, where is the sense in his becoming brave if he is to get no credit for it?

O.M. Your question will answer itself presently. It involves an important detail of man’s make which we have not yet
touched upon.

Y.M. What detail is that?

O.M. The impulse which moves a person to do things — the only impulse that ever moves a person to do a thing.

Y.M. The ONLY one! Is there but one?

O.M. That is all. There is only one.

Y.M. Well, certainly that is a strange enough doctrine. What is the sole impulse that ever moves a person to do a
thing?

O.M. The impulse to CONTENT HIS OWN SPIRIT— the NECESSITY of contenting his own spirit and WINNING ITS APPROVAL.

Y.M. Oh, come, that won’t do!

O.M. Why won’t it?

Y.M. Because it puts him in the attitude of always looking out for his own comfort and advantage; whereas an
unselfish man often does a thing solely for another person’s good when it is a positive disadvantage to himself.

O.M. It is a mistake. The act must do HIM good, FIRST; otherwise he will not do it. He may THINK he is doing it
solely for the other person’s sake, but it is not so; he is contenting his own spirit first — the other’s person’s
benefit has to always take SECOND place.

Y.M. What a fantastic idea! What becomes of self-sacrifice? Please answer me that.

O.M. What is self-sacrifice?

Y.M. The doing good to another person where no shadow nor suggestion of benefit to one’s self can result from
it.

II

Man’s Sole Impulse — the Securing of His Own Approval

Old Man. There have been instances of it — you think?

Young Man. INSTANCES? Millions of them!

O.M. You have not jumped to conclusions? You have examined them — critically?

Y.M. They don’t need it: the acts themselves reveal the golden impulse back of them.

O.M. For instance?

Y.M. Well, then, for instance. Take the case in the book here. The man lives three miles up-town. It is bitter cold,
snowing hard, midnight. He is about to enter the horse-car when a gray and ragged old woman, a touching picture of
misery, puts out her lean hand and begs for rescue from hunger and death. The man finds that he has a quarter in his
pocket, but he does not hesitate: he gives it her and trudges home through the storm. There — it is noble, it is
beautiful; its grace is marred by no fleck or blemish or suggestion of self-interest.

O.M. What makes you think that?

Y.M. Pray what else could I think? Do you imagine that there is some other way of looking at it?

O.M. Can you put yourself in the man’s place and tell me what he felt and what he thought?

Y.M. Easily. The sight of that suffering old face pierced his generous heart with a sharp pain. He could not bear
it. He could endure the three-mile walk in the storm, but he could not endure the tortures his conscience would suffer
if he turned his back and left that poor old creature to perish. He would not have been able to sleep, for thinking of
it.

O.M. What was his state of mind on his way home?

Y.M. It was a state of joy which only the self-sacrificer knows. His heart sang, he was unconscious of the
storm.

O.M. He felt well?

Y.M. One cannot doubt it.

O.M. Very well. Now let us add up the details and see how much he got for his twenty-five cents. Let us try to find
out the REAL why of his making the investment. In the first place HE couldn’t bear the pain which the old suffering
face gave him. So he was thinking of HIS pain — this good man. He must buy a salve for it. If he did not succor the old
woman HIS conscience would torture him all the way home. Thinking of HIS pain again. He must buy relief for that. If he
didn’t relieve the old woman HE would not get any sleep. He must buy some sleep — still thinking of HIMSELF, you see.
Thus, to sum up, he bought himself free of a sharp pain in his heart, he bought himself free of the tortures of a
waiting conscience, he bought a whole night’s sleep — all for twenty-five cents! It should make Wall Street ashamed of
itself. On his way home his heart was joyful, and it sang — profit on top of profit! The impulse which moved the man to
succor the old woman was — FIRST— to CONTENT HIS OWN SPIRIT; secondly to relieve HER sufferings. Is it your opinion
that men’s acts proceed from one central and unchanging and inalterable impulse, or from a variety of impulses?

Y.M. From a variety, of course — some high and fine and noble, others not. What is your opinion?

O.M. Then there is but ONE law, one source.

Y.M. That both the noblest impulses and the basest proceed from that one source?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Will you put that law into words?

O.M. Yes. This is the law, keep it in your mind. FROM HIS CRADLE TO HIS GRAVE A MAN NEVER DOES A SINGLE THING WHICH
HAS ANY FIRST AND FOREMOST OBJECT BUT ONE— TO SECURE PEACE OF MIND, SPIRITUAL COMFORT, FOR HIMSELF.

Y.M. Come! He never does anything for any one else’s comfort, spiritual or physical?

O.M. No. EXCEPT ON THOSE DISTINCT TERMS— that it shall FIRST secure HIS OWN spiritual comfort. Otherwise he will not
do it.

Y.M. It will be easy to expose the falsity of that proposition.

O.M. For instance?

Y.M. Take that noble passion, love of country, patriotism. A man who loves peace and dreads pain, leaves his
pleasant home and his weeping family and marches out to manfully expose himself to hunger, cold, wounds, and death. Is
that seeking spiritual comfort?

O.M. He loves peace and dreads pain?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Then perhaps there is something that he loves MORE than he loves peace — THE APPROVAL OF HIS NEIGHBORS AND THE
PUBLIC. And perhaps there is something which he dreads more than he dreads pain — the DISAPPROVAL of his neighbors and
the public. If he is sensitive to shame he will go to the field — not because his spirit will be ENTIRELY comfortable
there, but because it will be more comfortable there than it would be if he remained at home. He will always do the
thing which will bring him the MOST mental comfort — for that is THE SOLE LAW OF HIS LIFE. He leaves the weeping family
behind; he is sorry to make them uncomfortable, but not sorry enough to sacrifice his OWN comfort to secure theirs.

Y.M. Do you really believe that mere public opinion could force a timid and peaceful man to —

O.M. Go to war? Yes — public opinion can force some men to do ANYTHING.

Y.M. ANYTHING?

O.M. Yes — anything.

Y.M. I don’t believe that. Can it force a right-principled man to do a wrong thing?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Can it force a kind man to do a cruel thing?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Give an instance.

O.M. Alexander Hamilton was a conspicuously high-principled man. He regarded dueling as wrong, and as opposed to the
teachings of religion — but in deference to PUBLIC OPINION he fought a duel. He deeply loved his family, but to buy
public approval he treacherously deserted them and threw his life away, ungenerously leaving them to lifelong sorrow in
order that he might stand well with a foolish world. In the then condition of the public standards of honor he could
not have been comfortable with the stigma upon him of having refused to fight. The teachings of religion, his devotion
to his family, his kindness of heart, his high principles, all went for nothing when they stood in the way of his
spiritual comfort. A man will do ANYTHING, no matter what it is, TO SECURE HIS SPIRITUAL COMFORT; and he can neither be
forced nor persuaded to any act which has not that goal for its object. Hamilton’s act was compelled by the inborn
necessity of contenting his own spirit; in this it was like all the other acts of his life, and like all the acts of
all men’s lives. Do you see where the kernel of the matter lies? A man cannot be comfortable without HIS OWN approval.
He will secure the largest share possible of that, at all costs, all sacrifices.

Y.M. A minute ago you said Hamilton fought that duel to get PUBLIC approval.

O.M. I did. By refusing to fight the duel he would have secured his family’s approval and a large share of his own;
but the public approval was more valuable in his eyes than all other approvals put together — in the earth or above it;
to secure that would furnish him the MOST comfort of mind, the most SELF-approval; so he sacrificed all other values to
get it.

Y.M. Some noble souls have refused to fight duels, and have manfully braved the public contempt.

O.M. They acted ACCORDING TO THEIR MAKE. They valued their principles and the approval of their families ABOVE the
public approval. They took the thing they valued MOST and let the rest go. They took what would give them the LARGEST
share of PERSONAL CONTENTMENT AND APPROVAL— a man ALWAYS does. Public opinion cannot force that kind of men to go to
the wars. When they go it is for other reasons. Other spirit-contenting reasons.

Y.M. Always spirit-contenting reasons?

O.M. There are no others.

Y.M. When a man sacrifices his life to save a little child from a burning building, what do you call that?

O.M. When he does it, it is the law of HIS make. HE can’t bear to see the child in that peril (a man of a different
make COULD), and so he tries to save the child, and loses his life. But he has got what he was after — HIS OWN
APPROVAL.

O.M. Different results of the one Master Impulse: the necessity of securing one’s self approval. They wear diverse
clothes and are subject to diverse moods, but in whatsoever ways they masquerade they are the SAME PERSON all the time.
To change the figure, the COMPULSION that moves a man — and there is but the one — is the necessity of securing the
contentment of his own spirit. When it stops, the man is dead.

Y.M. That is foolishness. Love —

O.M. Why, love is that impulse, that law, in its most uncompromising form. It will squander life and everything else
on its object. Not PRIMARILY for the object’s sake, but for ITS OWN. When its object is happy IT is happy — and that is
what it is unconsciously after.

Y.M. You do not even except the lofty and gracious passion of mother-love?

O.M. No, IT is the absolute slave of that law. The mother will go naked to clothe her child; she will starve that it
may have food; suffer torture to save it from pain; die that it may live. She takes a living PLEASURE in making these
sacrifices. SHE DOES IT FOR THAT REWARD— that self-approval, that contentment, that peace, that comfort. SHE WOULD DO
IT FOR YOUR CHILD IF SHE COULD GET THE SAME PAY.

Y.M. This is an infernal philosophy of yours.

O.M. It isn’t a philosophy, it is a fact.

Y.M. Of course you must admit that there are some acts which —

O.M. No. There is NO act, large or small, fine or mean, which springs from any motive but the one — the necessity of
appeasing and contenting one’s own spirit.

Y.M. The world’s philanthropists —

O.M. I honor them, I uncover my head to them — from habit and training; and THEY could not know comfort or happiness
or self-approval if they did not work and spend for the unfortunate. It makes THEM happy to see others happy; and so
with money and labor they buy what they are after — HAPPINESS, SELF-APPROVAL. Why don’t miners do the same thing?
Because they can get a thousandfold more happiness by NOT doing it. There is no other reason. They follow the law of
their make.

Y.M. What do you say of duty for duty’s sake?

O.M. That IS DOES NOT EXIST. Duties are not performed for duty’s SAKE, but because their NEGLECT would make the man
UNCOMFORTABLE. A man performs but ONE duty — the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to
himself. If he can most satisfyingly perform this sole and only duty by HELPING his neighbor, he will do it; if he can
most satisfyingly perform it by SWINDLING his neighbor, he will do it. But he always looks out for Number One — FIRST;
the effects upon others are a SECONDARY matter. Men pretend to self-sacrifices, but this is a thing which, in the
ordinary value of the phrase, DOES NOT EXIST AND HAS NOT EXISTED. A man often honestly THINKS he is sacrificing himself
merely and solely for some one else, but he is deceived; his bottom impulse is to content a requirement of his nature
and training, and thus acquire peace for his soul.

Y.M. Apparently, then, all men, both good and bad ones, devote their lives to contenting their consciences.

O.M. Yes. That is a good enough name for it: Conscience — that independent Sovereign, that insolent absolute Monarch
inside of a man who is the man’s Master. There are all kinds of consciences, because there are all kinds of men. You
satisfy an assassin’s conscience in one way, a philanthropist’s in another, a miser’s in another, a burglar’s in still
another. As a GUIDE or INCENTIVE to any authoritatively prescribed line of morals or conduct (leaving TRAINING out of
the account), a man’s conscience is totally valueless. I know a kind-hearted Kentuckian whose self-approval was lacking
— whose conscience was troubling him, to phrase it with exactness — BECAUSE HE HAD NEGLECTED TO KILL A CERTAIN MAN— a
man whom he had never seen. The stranger had killed this man’s friend in a fight, this man’s Kentucky training made it
a duty to kill the stranger for it. He neglected his duty — kept dodging it, shirking it, putting it off, and his
unrelenting conscience kept persecuting him for this conduct. At last, to get ease of mind, comfort, self-approval, he
hunted up the stranger and took his life. It was an immense act of SELF-SACRIFICE (as per the usual definition), for he
did not want to do it, and he never would have done it if he could have bought a contented spirit and an unworried mind
at smaller cost. But we are so made that we will pay ANYTHING for that contentment — even another man’s life.

Y.M. You spoke a moment ago of TRAINED consciences. You mean that we are not BORN with consciences competent to
guide us aright?

O.M. If we were, children and savages would know right from wrong, and not have to be taught it.

Y.M. But consciences can be TRAINED?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. Of course by parents, teachers, the pulpit, and books.

O.M. Yes — they do their share; they do what they can.

Y.M. And the rest is done by —

O.M. Oh, a million unnoticed influences — for good or bad: influences which work without rest during every waking
moment of a man’s life, from cradle to grave.

Y.M. You have tabulated these?

O.M. Many of them — yes.

Y.M. Will you read me the result?

O.M. Another time, yes. It would take an hour.

Y.M. A conscience can be trained to shun evil and prefer good?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. But will it for spirit-contenting reasons only?

O.M. It CAN’T be trained to do a thing for any OTHER reason. The thing is impossible.

Y.M. There MUST be a genuinely and utterly self-sacrificing act recorded in human history somewhere.

O.M. You are young. You have many years before you. Search one out.

Y.M. It does seem to me that when a man sees a fellow-being struggling in the water and jumps in at the risk of his
life to save him —

O.M. Wait. Describe the MAN. Describe the FELLOW-BEING. State if there is an AUDIENCE present; or if they are
ALONE.

Y.M. What have these things to do with the splendid act?

O.M. Very much. Shall we suppose, as a beginning, that the two are alone, in a solitary place, at midnight?

Y.M. If you choose.

O.M. And that the fellow-being is the man’s daughter?

Y.M. Well, n-no — make it someone else.

O.M. A filthy, drunken ruffian, then?

Y.M. I see. Circumstances alter cases. I suppose that if there was no audience to observe the act, the man wouldn’t
perform it.

O.M. But there is here and there a man who WOULD. People, for instance, like the man who lost his life trying to
save the child from the fire; and the man who gave the needy old woman his twenty-five cents and walked home in the
storm — there are here and there men like that who would do it. And why? Because they couldn’t BEAR to see a
fellow-being struggling in the water and not jump in and help. It would give THEM pain. They would save the
fellow-being on that account. THEY WOULDN’T DO IT OTHERWISE. They strictly obey the law which I have been insisting
upon. You must remember and always distinguish the people who CAN’T BEAR things from people who CAN. It will throw
light upon a number of apparently “self-sacrificing” cases.

Y.M. Oh, dear, it’s all so disgusting.

O.M. Yes. And so true.

Y.M. Come — take the good boy who does things he doesn’t want to do, in order to gratify his mother.

O.M. He does seven-tenths of the act because it gratifies HIM to gratify his mother. Throw the bulk of advantage the
other way and the good boy would not do the act. He MUST obey the iron law. None can escape it.

Y.M. Well, take the case of a bad boy who —

O.M. You needn’t mention it, it is a waste of time. It is no matter about the bad boy’s act. Whatever it was, he had
a spirit-contenting reason for it. Otherwise you have been misinformed, and he didn’t do it.

Y.M. It is very exasperating. A while ago you said that man’s conscience is not a born judge of morals and conduct,
but has to be taught and trained. Now I think a conscience can get drowsy and lazy, but I don’t think it can go wrong;
if you wake it up —

A Little Story

O.M. I will tell you a little story:

Once upon a time an Infidel was guest in the house of a Christian widow whose little boy was ill and near to death.
The Infidel often watched by the bedside and entertained the boy with talk, and he used these opportunities to satisfy
a strong longing in his nature — that desire which is in us all to better other people’s condition by having them think
as we think. He was successful. But the dying boy, in his last moments, reproached him and said:

“I BELIEVED, AND WAS HAPPY IN IT; YOU HAVE TAKEN MY BELIEF AWAY, AND MY COMFORT. NOW I HAVE NOTHING LEFT, AND I DIE
MISERABLE; FOR THE THINGS WHICH YOU HAVE TOLD ME DO NOT TAKE THE PLACE OF THAT WHICH I HAVE LOST.”

And the mother, also, reproached the Infidel, and said:

“MY CHILD IS FOREVER LOST, AND MY HEART IS BROKEN. HOW COULD YOU DO THIS CRUEL THING? WE HAVE DONE YOU NO HARM, BUT
ONLY KINDNESS; WE MADE OUR HOUSE YOUR HOME, YOU WERE WELCOME TO ALL WE HAD, AND THIS IS OUR REWARD.”

The heart of the Infidel was filled with remorse for what he had done, and he said:

“IT WAS WRONG— I SEE IT NOW; BUT I WAS ONLY TRYING TO DO HIM GOOD. IN MY VIEW HE WAS IN ERROR; IT SEEMED MY DUTY TO
TEACH HIM THE TRUTH.”

Then the mother said:

“I HAD TAUGHT HIM, ALL HIS LITTLE LIFE, WHAT I BELIEVED TO BE THE TRUTH, AND IN HIS BELIEVING FAITH BOTH OF US WERE
HAPPY. NOW HE IS DEAD, — AND LOST; AND I AM MISERABLE. OUR FAITH CAME DOWN TO US THROUGH CENTURIES OF BELIEVING
ANCESTORS; WHAT RIGHT HAD YOU, OR ANY ONE, TO DISTURB IT? WHERE WAS YOUR HONOR, WHERE WAS YOUR SHAME?”

Y.M. He was a miscreant, and deserved death!

O.M. He thought so himself, and said so.

Y.M. Ah — you see, HIS CONSCIENCE WAS AWAKENED!

O.M. Yes, his Self–Disapproval was. It PAINED him to see the mother suffer. He was sorry he had done a thing which
brought HIM pain. It did not occur to him to think of the mother when he was misteaching the boy, for he was absorbed
in providing PLEASURE for himself, then. Providing it by satisfying what he believed to be a call of duty.

Y.M. Call it what you please, it is to me a case of AWAKENED CONSCIENCE. That awakened conscience could never get
itself into that species of trouble again. A cure like that is a PERMANENT cure.

O.M. Pardon — I had not finished the story. We are creatures of OUTSIDE INFLUENCES— we originate NOTHING within.
Whenever we take a new line of thought and drift into a new line of belief and action, the impulse is ALWAYS suggested
from the OUTSIDE. Remorse so preyed upon the Infidel that it dissolved his harshness toward the boy’s religion and made
him come to regard it with tolerance, next with kindness, for the boy’s sake and the mother’s. Finally he found himself
examining it. From that moment his progress in his new trend was steady and rapid. He became a believing Christian. And
now his remorse for having robbed the dying boy of his faith and his salvation was bitterer than ever. It gave him no
rest, no peace. He MUST have rest and peace — it is the law of nature. There seemed but one way to get it; he must
devote himself to saving imperiled souls. He became a missionary. He landed in a pagan country ill and helpless. A
native widow took him into her humble home and nursed him back to convalescence. Then her young boy was taken
hopelessly ill, and the grateful missionary helped her tend him. Here was his first opportunity to repair a part of the
wrong done to the other boy by doing a precious service for this one by undermining his foolish faith in his false
gods. He was successful. But the dying boy in his last moments reproached him and said:

“I BELIEVED, AND WAS HAPPY IN IT; YOU HAVE TAKEN MY BELIEF AWAY, AND MY COMFORT. NOW I HAVE NOTHING LEFT, AND I DIE
MISERABLE; FOR THE THINGS WHICH YOU HAVE TOLD ME DO NOT TAKE THE PLACE OF THAT WHICH I HAVE LOST.”

And the mother, also, reproached the missionary, and said:

“MY CHILD IS FOREVER LOST, AND MY HEART IS BROKEN. HOW COULD YOU DO THIS CRUEL THING? WE HAD DONE YOU NO HARM, BUT
ONLY KINDNESS; WE MADE OUR HOUSE YOUR HOME, YOU WERE WELCOME TO ALL WE HAD, AND THIS IS OUR REWARD.”

The heart of the missionary was filled with remorse for what he had done, and he said:

“IT WAS WRONG— I SEE IT NOW; BUT I WAS ONLY TRYING TO DO HIM GOOD. IN MY VIEW HE WAS IN ERROR; IT SEEMED MY DUTY TO
TEACH HIM THE TRUTH.”

Then the mother said:

“I HAD TAUGHT HIM, ALL HIS LITTLE LIFE, WHAT I BELIEVED TO BE THE TRUTH, AND IN HIS BELIEVING FAITH BOTH OF US WERE
HAPPY. NOW HE IS DEAD— AND LOST; AND I AM MISERABLE. OUR FAITH CAME DOWN TO US THROUGH CENTURIES OF BELIEVING
ANCESTORS; WHAT RIGHT HAD YOU, OR ANY ONE, TO DISTURB IT? WHERE WAS YOUR HONOR, WHERE WAS YOUR SHAME?”

The missionary’s anguish of remorse and sense of treachery were as bitter and persecuting and unappeasable, now, as
they had been in the former case. The story is finished. What is your comment?

Y.M. The man’s conscience is a fool! It was morbid. It didn’t know right from wrong.

O.M. I am not sorry to hear you say that. If you grant that ONE man’s conscience doesn’t know right from wrong, it
is an admission that there are others like it. This single admission pulls down the whole doctrine of infallibility of
judgment in consciences. Meantime there is one thing which I ask you to notice.

Y.M. What is that?

O.M. That in both cases the man’s ACT gave him no spiritual discomfort, and that he was quite satisfied with it and
got pleasure out of it. But afterward when it resulted in PAIN to HIM, he was sorry. Sorry it had inflicted pain upon
the others, BUT FOR NO REASON UNDER THE SUN EXCEPT THAT THEIR PAIN GAVE HIM PAIN. Our consciences take NO notice of
pain inflicted upon others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to US. In ALL cases without exception we are
absolutely indifferent to another person’s pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable. Many an infidel would not
have been troubled by that Christian mother’s distress. Don’t you believe that?

Y.M. Yes. You might almost say it of the AVERAGE infidel, I think.

O.M. And many a missionary, sternly fortified by his sense of duty, would not have been troubled by the pagan
mother’s distress — Jesuit missionaries in Canada in the early French times, for instance; see episodes quoted by
Parkman.

Y.M. Well, let us adjourn. Where have we arrived?

O.M. At this. That we (mankind) have ticketed ourselves with a number of qualities to which we have given misleading
names. Love, Hate, Charity, Compassion, Avarice, Benevolence, and so on. I mean we attach misleading MEANINGS to the
names. They are all forms of self-contentment, self-gratification, but the names so disguise them that they distract
our attention from the fact. Also we have smuggled a word into the dictionary which ought not to be there at all —
Self–Sacrifice. It describes a thing which does not exist. But worst of all, we ignore and never mention the Sole
Impulse which dictates and compels a man’s every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every
emergency and at all costs. To it we owe all that we are. It is our breath, our heart, our blood. It is our only spur,
our whip, our goad, our only impelling power; we have no other. Without it we should be mere inert images, corpses; no
one would do anything, there would be no progress, the world would stand still. We ought to stand reverently uncovered
when the name of that stupendous power is uttered.

Y.M. I am not convinced.

O.M. You will be when you think.

III

Instances in Point

Old Man. Have you given thought to the Gospel of Self–Approval since we talked?

Young Man. I have.

O.M. It was I that moved you to it. That is to say an OUTSIDE INFLUENCE moved you to it — not one that originated in
your head. Will you try to keep that in mind and not forget it?

Y.M. Yes. Why?

O.M. Because by and by in one of our talks, I wish to further impress upon you that neither you, nor I, nor any man
ever originates a thought in his own head. THE UTTERER OF A THOUGHT ALWAYS UTTERS A SECOND-HAND ONE.

Y.M. Oh, now —

O.M. Wait. Reserve your remark till we get to that part of our discussion — tomorrow or next day, say. Now, then,
have you been considering the proposition that no act is ever born of any but a self-contenting impulse — (primarily).
You have sought. What have you found?

Y.M. I have not been very fortunate. I have examined many fine and apparently self-sacrificing deeds in romances and
biographies, but —

Y.M. But here in this novel is one which seems to promise. In the Adirondack woods is a wage-earner and lay preacher
in the lumber-camps who is of noble character and deeply religious. An earnest and practical laborer in the New York
slums comes up there on vacation — he is leader of a section of the University Settlement. Holme, the lumberman, is
fired with a desire to throw away his excellent worldly prospects and go down and save souls on the East Side. He
counts it happiness to make this sacrifice for the glory of God and for the cause of Christ. He resigns his place,
makes the sacrifice cheerfully, and goes to the East Side and preaches Christ and Him crucified every day and every
night to little groups of half-civilized foreign paupers who scoff at him. But he rejoices in the scoffings, since he
is suffering them in the great cause of Christ. You have so filled my mind with suspicions that I was constantly
expecting to find a hidden questionable impulse back of all this, but I am thankful to say I have failed. This man saw
his duty, and for DUTY’S SAKE he sacrificed self and assumed the burden it imposed.

O.M. Is that as far as you have read?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Let us read further, presently. Meantime, in sacrificing himself — NOT for the glory of God, PRIMARILY, as HE
imagined, but FIRST to content that exacting and inflexible master within him — DID HE SACRIFICE ANYBODY ELSE?

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. He relinquished a lucrative post and got mere food and lodging in place of it. Had he dependents?

Y.M. Well — yes.

O.M. In what way and to what extend did his self-sacrifice affect THEM?

Y.M. He was the support of a superannuated father. He had a young sister with a remarkable voice — he was giving her
a musical education, so that her longing to be self-supporting might be gratified. He was furnishing the money to put a
young brother through a polytechnic school and satisfy his desire to become a civil engineer.

O.M. The old father’s comforts were now curtailed?

Y.M. Quite seriously. Yes.

O.M. The sister’s music-lessens had to stop?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. The young brother’s education — well, an extinguishing blight fell upon that happy dream, and he had to go to
sawing wood to support the old father, or something like that?

Y.M. It is about what happened. Yes.

O.M. What a handsome job of self-sacrificing he did do! It seems to me that he sacrificed everybody EXCEPT himself.
Haven’t I told you that no man EVER sacrifices himself; that there is no instance of it upon record anywhere; and that
when a man’s Interior Monarch requires a thing of its slave for either its MOMENTARY or its PERMANENT contentment, that
thing must and will be furnished and that command obeyed, no matter who may stand in the way and suffer disaster by it?
That man RUINED HIS FAMILY to please and content his Interior Monarch —

Y.M. And help Christ’s cause.

O.M. Yes — SECONDLY. Not firstly. HE thought it was firstly.

Y.M. Very well, have it so, if you will. But it could be that he argued that if he saved a hundred souls in New York
—

O.M. The sacrifice of the FAMILY would be justified by that great profit upon the — the — what shall we call it?

Y.M. Investment?

O.M. Hardly. How would SPECULATION do? How would GAMBLE do? Not a solitary soul-capture was sure. He played for a
possible thirty-three-hundred-per-cent profit. It was GAMBLING— with his family for “chips.” However let us see how the
game came out. Maybe we can get on the track of the secret original impulse, the REAL impulse, that moved him to so
nobly self-sacrifice his family in the Savior’s cause under the superstition that he was sacrificing himself. I will
read a chapter or so. . . . Here we have it! It was bound to expose itself sooner or later. He preached to
the East–Side rabble a season, then went back to his old dull, obscure life in the lumber-camps “HURT TO THE HEART, HIS
PRIDE HUMBLED.” Why? Were not his efforts acceptable to the Savior, for Whom alone they were made? Dear me, that detail
is LOST SIGHT OF, is not even referred to, the fact that it started out as a motive is entirely forgotten! Then what is
the trouble? The authoress quite innocently and unconsciously gives the whole business away. The trouble was this: this
man merely PREACHED to the poor; that is not the University Settlement’s way; it deals in larger and better things than
that, and it did not enthuse over that crude Salvation–Army eloquence. It was courteous to Holme — but cool. It did not
pet him, did not take him to its bosom. “PERISHED WERE ALL HIS DREAMS OF DISTINCTION, THE PRAISE AND GRATEFUL APPROVAL—
” Of whom? The Savior? No; the Savior is not mentioned. Of whom, then? Of “His FELLOW-WORKERS.” Why did he want that?
Because the Master inside of him wanted it, and would not be content without it. That emphasized sentence quoted above,
reveals the secret we have been seeking, the original impulse, the REAL impulse, which moved the obscure and
unappreciated Adirondack lumberman to sacrifice his family and go on that crusade to the East Side — which said
original impulse was this, to wit: without knowing it HE WENT THERE TO SHOW A NEGLECTED WORLD THE LARGE TALENT THAT WAS
IN HIM, AND RISE TO DISTINCTION. As I have warned you before, NO act springs from any but the one law, the one motive.
But I pray you, do not accept this law upon my say-so; but diligently examine for yourself. Whenever you read of a
self-sacrificing act or hear of one, or of a duty done for DUTY’S SAKE, take it to pieces and look for the REAL motive.
It is always there.

Y.M. I do it every day. I cannot help it, now that I have gotten started upon the degrading and exasperating quest.
For it is hatefully interesting! — in fact, fascinating is the word. As soon as I come across a golden deed in a book I
have to stop and take it apart and examine it, I cannot help myself.

O.M. Have you ever found one that defeated the rule?

Y.M. No — at least, not yet. But take the case of servant-tipping in Europe. You pay the HOTEL for service; you owe
the servants NOTHING, yet you pay them besides. Doesn’t that defeat it?

O.M. In what way?

Y.M. You are not OBLIGED to do it, therefore its source is compassion for their ill-paid condition, and —

O.M. Has that custom ever vexed you, annoyed you, irritated you?

Y.M. Well, yes.

O.M. Still you succumbed to it?

Y.M. Of course.

O.M. Why of course?

Y.M. Well, custom is law, in a way, and laws must be submitted to — everybody recognizes it as a DUTY.

O.M. Then you pay for the irritating tax for DUTY’S sake?

Y.M. I suppose it amounts to that.

O.M. Then the impulse which moves you to submit to the tax is not ALL compassion, charity, benevolence?

Y.M. Well — perhaps not.

O.M. Is ANY of it?

Y.M. I— perhaps I was too hasty in locating its source.

O.M. Perhaps so. In case you ignored the custom would you get prompt and effective service from the servants?

Y.M. Oh, hear yourself talk! Those European servants? Why, you wouldn’t get any of all, to speak of.

O.M. Couldn’t THAT work as an impulse to move you to pay the tax?

Y.M. I am not denying it.

O.M. Apparently, then, it is a case of for-duty’s-sake with a little self-interest added?

Y.M. Yes, it has the look of it. But here is a point: we pay that tax knowing it to be unjust and an extortion; yet
we go away with a pain at the heart if we think we have been stingy with the poor fellows; and we heartily wish we were
back again, so that we could do the right thing, and MORE than the right thing, the GENEROUS thing. I think it will be
difficult for you to find any thought of self in that impulse.

O.M. I wonder why you should think so. When you find service charged in the HOTEL bill does it annoy you?

Y.M. No.

O.M. Do you ever complain of the amount of it?

Y.M. No, it would not occur to me.

O.M. The EXPENSE, then, is not the annoying detail. It is a fixed charge, and you pay it cheerfully, you pay it
without a murmur. When you came to pay the servants, how would you like it if each of the men and maids had a fixed
charge?

Y.M. Like it? I should rejoice!

O.M. Even if the fixed tax were a shade MORE than you had been in the habit of paying in the form of tips?

Y.M. Indeed, yes!

O.M. Very well, then. As I understand it, it isn’t really compassion nor yet duty that moves you to pay the tax, and
it isn’t the AMOUNT of the tax that annoys you. Yet SOMETHING annoys you. What is it?

Y.M. Well, the trouble is, you never know WHAT to pay, the tax varies so, all over Europe.

O.M. So you have to guess?

Y.M. There is no other way. So you go on thinking and thinking, and calculating and guessing, and consulting with
other people and getting their views; and it spoils your sleep nights, and makes you distraught in the daytime, and
while you are pretending to look at the sights you are only guessing and guessing and guessing all the time, and being
worried and miserable.

O.M. And all about a debt which you don’t owe and don’t have to pay unless you want to! Strange. What is the purpose
of the guessing?

Y.M. To guess out what is right to give them, and not be unfair to any of them.

O.M. It has quite a noble look — taking so much pains and using up so much valuable time in order to be just and
fair to a poor servant to whom you owe nothing, but who needs money and is ill paid.

Y.M. I think, myself, that if there is any ungracious motive back of it it will be hard to find.

O.M. How do you know when you have not paid a servant fairly?

Y.M. Why, he is silent; does not thank you. Sometimes he gives you a look that makes you ashamed. You are too proud
to rectify your mistake there, with people looking, but afterward you keep on wishing and wishing you HAD done it. My,
the shame and the pain of it! Sometimes you see, by the signs, that you have it JUST RIGHT, and you go away mightily
satisfied. Sometimes the man is so effusively thankful that you know you have given him a good deal MORE than was
necessary.

O.M. NECESSARY? Necessary for what?

Y.M. To content him.

O.M. How do you feel THEN?

Y.M. Repentant.

O.M. It is my belief that you have NOT been concerning yourself in guessing out his just dues, but only in ciphering
out what would CONTENT him. And I think you have a self-deluding reason for that.

Y.M. What was it?

O.M. If you fell short of what he was expecting and wanting, you would get a look which would SHAME YOU BEFORE FOLK.
That would give you PAIN. YOU— for you are only working for yourself, not HIM. If you gave him too much you would be
ASHAMED OF YOURSELF for it, and that would give YOU pain — another case of thinking of YOURSELF, protecting yourself,
SAVING YOURSELF FROM DISCOMFORT. You never think of the servant once — except to guess out how to get HIS APPROVAL. If
you get that, you get your OWN approval, and that is the sole and only thing you are after. The Master inside of you is
then satisfied, contented, comfortable; there was NO OTHER thing at stake, as a matter of FIRST interest, anywhere in
the transaction.

O.M. That no man has ever sacrificed himself in the common meaning of that phrase — which is, self-sacrifice for
another ALONE. Men make daily sacrifices for others, but it is for their own sake FIRST. The act must content their own
spirit FIRST. The other beneficiaries come second.

Y.M. And the same with duty for duty’s sake?

O.M. Yes. No man performs a duty for mere duty’s sake; the act must content his spirit FIRST. He must feel better
for DOING the duty than he would for shirking it. Otherwise he will not do it.

Y.M. Take the case of the BERKELEY CASTLE.

O.M. It was a noble duty, greatly performed. Take it to pieces and examine it, if you like.

Y.M. A British troop-ship crowded with soldiers and their wives and children. She struck a rock and began to sink.
There was room in the boats for the women and children only. The colonel lined up his regiment on the deck and said “it
is our duty to die, that they may be saved.” There was no murmur, no protest. The boats carried away the women and
children. When the death-moment was come, the colonel and his officers took their several posts, the men stood at
shoulder-arms, and so, as on dress-parade, with their flag flying and the drums beating, they went down, a sacrifice to
duty for duty’s sake. Can you view it as other than that?

O.M. It was something as fine as that, as exalted as that. Could you have remained in those ranks and gone down to
your death in that unflinching way?

Y.M. I can imagine it. I feel all the horror of it. I could not have endured it, I could not have remained in my
place. I know it.

O.M. Why?

Y.M. There is no why about it: I know myself, and I know I couldn’t DO it.

O.M. But it would be your DUTY to do it.

Y.M. Yes, I know — but I couldn’t.

O.M. It was more than thousand men, yet not one of them flinched. Some of them must have been born with your
temperament; if they could do that great duty for duty’s SAKE, why not you? Don’t you know that you could go out and
gather together a thousand clerks and mechanics and put them on that deck and ask them to die for duty’s sake, and not
two dozen of them would stay in the ranks to the end?

Y.M. Yes, I know that.

O.M. But you TRAIN them, and put them through a campaign or two; then they would be soldiers; soldiers, with a
soldier’s pride, a soldier’s self-respect, a soldier’s ideals. They would have to content a SOLDIER’S spirit then, not
a clerk’s, not a mechanic’s. They could not content that spirit by shirking a soldier’s duty, could they?

Y.M. I suppose not.

O.M. Then they would do the duty not for the DUTY’S sake, but for their OWN sake — primarily. The DUTY was JUST THE
SAME, and just as imperative, when they were clerks, mechanics, raw recruits, but they wouldn’t perform it for that. As
clerks and mechanics they had other ideals, another spirit to satisfy, and they satisfied it. They HAD to; it is the
law. TRAINING is potent. Training toward higher and higher, and ever higher ideals is worth any man’s thought and labor
and diligence.

Y.M. Consider the man who stands by his duty and goes to the stake rather than be recreant to it.

O.M. It is his make and his training. He has to content the spirit that is in him, though it cost him his life.
Another man, just as sincerely religious, but of different temperament, will fail of that duty, though recognizing it
as a duty, and grieving to be unequal to it: but he must content the spirit that is in him — he cannot help it. He
could not perform that duty for duty’s SAKE, for that would not content his spirit, and the contenting of his spirit
must be looked to FIRST. It takes precedence of all other duties.

Y.M. Take the case of a clergyman of stainless private morals who votes for a thief for public office, on his own
party’s ticket, and against an honest man on the other ticket.

O.M. He has to content his spirit. He has no public morals; he has no private ones, where his party’s prosperity is
at stake. He will always be true to his make and training.

IV

Training

Young Man. You keep using that word — training. By it do you particularly mean —

Old Man. Study, instruction, lectures, sermons? That is a part of it — but not a large part. I mean ALL the outside
influences. There are a million of them. From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human being is
under training. In the very first rank of his trainers stands ASSOCIATION. It is his human environment which influences
his mind and his feelings, furnishes him his ideals, and sets him on his road and keeps him in it. If he leave that
road he will find himself shunned by the people whom he most loves and esteems, and whose approval he most values. He
is a chameleon; by the law of his nature he takes the color of his place of resort. The influences about him create his
preferences, his aversions, his politics, his tastes, his morals, his religion. He creates none of these things for
himself. He THINKS he does, but that is because he has not examined into the matter. You have seen Presbyterians?

Y.M. Many.

O.M. How did they happen to be Presbyterians and not Congregationalists? And why were the Congregationalists not
Baptists, and the Baptists Roman Catholics, and the Roman Catholics Buddhists, and the Buddhists Quakers, and the
Quakers Episcopalians, and the Episcopalians Millerites and the Millerites Hindus, and the Hindus Atheists, and the
Atheists Spiritualists, and the Spiritualists Agnostics, and the Agnostics Methodists, and the Methodists Confucians,
and the Confucians Unitarians, and the Unitarians Mohammedans, and the Mohammedans Salvation Warriors, and the
Salvation Warriors Zoroastrians, and the Zoroastrians Christian Scientists, and the Christian Scientists Mormons — and
so on?

Y.M. You may answer your question yourself.

O.M. That list of sects is not a record of STUDIES, searchings, seekings after light; it mainly (and sarcastically)
indicates what ASSOCIATION can do. If you know a man’s nationality you can come within a split hair of guessing the
complexion of his religion: English — Protestant; American — ditto; Spaniard, Frenchman, Irishman, Italian, South
American — Roman Catholic; Russian — Greek Catholic; Turk — Mohammedan; and so on. And when you know the man’s
religious complexion, you know what sort of religious books he reads when he wants some more light, and what sort of
books he avoids, lest by accident he get more light than he wants. In America if you know which party-collar a voter
wears, you know what his associations are, and how he came by his politics, and which breed of newspaper he reads to
get light, and which breed he diligently avoids, and which breed of mass-meetings he attends in order to broaden his
political knowledge, and which breed of mass-meetings he doesn’t attend, except to refute its doctrines with brickbats.
We are always hearing of people who are around SEEKING AFTER TRUTH. I have never seen a (permanent) specimen. I think
he had never lived. But I have seen several entirely sincere people who THOUGHT they were (permanent) Seekers after
Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely
adjusted judgment — until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. THAT WAS THE END OF
THE SEARCH. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. If
he was seeking after political Truth he found it in one or another of the hundred political gospels which govern men in
the earth; if he was seeking after the Only True Religion he found it in one or another of the three thousand that are
on the market. In any case, when he found the Truth HE SOUGHT NO FURTHER; but from that day forth, with his
soldering-iron in one hand and his bludgeon in the other he tinkered its leaks and reasoned with objectors. There have
been innumerable Temporary Seekers of Truth — have you ever heard of a permanent one? In the very nature of man such a
person is impossible. However, to drop back to the text — training: all training is one from or another of OUTSIDE
INFLUENCE, and ASSOCIATION is the largest part of it. A man is never anything but what his outside influences have made
him. They train him downward or they train him upward — but they TRAIN him; they are at work upon him all the time.

Y.M. Then if he happen by the accidents of life to be evilly placed there is no help for him, according to your
notions — he must train downward.

O.M. No help for him? No help for this chameleon? It is a mistake. It is in his chameleonship that his greatest good
fortune lies. He has only to change his habitat — his ASSOCIATIONS. But the impulse to do it must come from the
OUTSIDE— he cannot originate it himself, with that purpose in view. Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can
furnish him the initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a new idea. The chance remark of a sweetheart, “I
hear that you are a coward,” may water a seed that shall sprout and bloom and flourish, and ended in producing a
surprising fruitage — in the fields of war. The history of man is full of such accidents. The accident of a broken leg
brought a profane and ribald soldier under religious influences and furnished him a new ideal. From that accident
sprang the Order of the Jesuits, and it has been shaking thrones, changing policies, and doing other tremendous work
for two hundred years — and will go on. The chance reading of a book or of a paragraph in a newspaper can start a man
on a new track and make him renounce his old associations and seek new ones that are IN SYMPATHY WITH HIS NEW IDEAL:
and the result, for that man, can be an entire change of his way of life.

Y.M. Are you hinting at a scheme of procedure?

O.M. Not a new one — an old one. Old as mankind.

Y.M. What is it?

O.M. Merely the laying of traps for people. Traps baited with INITIATORY IMPULSES TOWARD HIGH IDEALS. It is what the
tract-distributor does. It is what the missionary does. It is what governments ought to do.

Y.M. Don’t they?

O.M. In one way they do, in another they don’t. They separate the smallpox patients from the healthy people, but in
dealing with crime they put the healthy into the pest-house along with the sick. That is to say, they put the beginners
in with the confirmed criminals. This would be well if man were naturally inclined to good, but he isn’t, and so
ASSOCIATION makes the beginners worse than they were when they went into captivity. It is putting a very severe
punishment upon the comparatively innocent at times. They hang a man — which is a trifling punishment; this breaks the
hearts of his family — which is a heavy one. They comfortably jail and feed a wife-beater, and leave his innocent wife
and family to starve.

Y.M. Do you believe in the doctrine that man is equipped with an intuitive perception of good and evil?

O.M. Adam hadn’t it.

Y.M. But has man acquired it since?

O.M. No. I think he has no intuitions of any kind. He gets ALL his ideas, all his impressions, from the outside. I
keep repeating this, in the hope that I may impress it upon you that you will be interested to observe and examine for
yourself and see whether it is true or false.

Y.M. Where did you get your own aggravating notions?

O.M. From the OUTSIDE. I did not invent them. They are gathered from a thousand unknown sources. Mainly
UNCONSCIOUSLY gathered.

Y.M. Don’t you believe that God could make an inherently honest man?

O.M. Yes, I know He could. I also know that He never did make one.

Y.M. A wiser observer than you has recorded the fact that “an honest man’s the noblest work of God.”

O.M. He didn’t record a fact, he recorded a falsity. It is windy, and sounds well, but it is not true. God makes a
man with honest and dishonest POSSIBILITIES in him and stops there. The man’s ASSOCIATIONS develop the possibilities —
the one set or the other. The result is accordingly an honest man or a dishonest one.

Y.M. And the honest one is not entitled to —

O.M. Praise? No. How often must I tell you that? HE is not the architect of his honesty.

Y.M. Now then, I will ask you where there is any sense in training people to lead virtuous lives. What is gained by
it?

O.M. The man himself gets large advantages out of it, and that is the main thing — to HIM. He is not a peril to his
neighbors, he is not a damage to them — and so THEY get an advantage out of his virtues. That is the main thing to
THEM. It can make this life comparatively comfortable to the parties concerned; the NEGLECT of this training can make
this life a constant peril and distress to the parties concerned.

Y.M. You have said that training is everything; that training is the man HIMSELF, for it makes him what he is.

O.M. I said training and ANOTHER thing. Let that other thing pass, for the moment. What were you going to say?

Y.M. We have an old servant. She has been with us twenty-two years. Her service used to be faultless, but now she
has become very forgetful. We are all fond of her; we all recognize that she cannot help the infirmity which age has
brought her; the rest of the family do not scold her for her remissnesses, but at times I do — I can’t seem to control
myself. Don’t I try? I do try. Now, then, when I was ready to dress, this morning, no clean clothes had been put out. I
lost my temper; I lose it easiest and quickest in the early morning. I rang; and immediately began to warn myself not
to show temper, and to be careful and speak gently. I safe-guarded myself most carefully. I even chose the very word I
would use: “You’ve forgotten the clean clothes, Jane.” When she appeared in the door I opened my mouth to say that
phrase — and out of it, moved by an instant surge of passion which I was not expecting and hadn’t time to put under
control, came the hot rebuke, “You’ve forgotten them again!” You say a man always does the thing which will best please
his Interior Master. Whence came the impulse to make careful preparation to save the girl the humiliation of a rebuke?
Did that come from the Master, who is always primarily concerned about HIMSELF?

O.M. Unquestionably. There is no other source for any impulse. SECONDARILY you made preparation to save the girl,
but PRIMARILY its object was to save yourself, by contenting the Master.

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. Has any member of the family ever implored you to watch your temper and not fly out at the girl?

Y.M. Yes. My mother.

O.M. You love her?

Y.M. Oh, more than that!

O.M. You would always do anything in your power to please her?

Y.M. It is a delight to me to do anything to please her!

O.M. Why? YOU WOULD DO IT FOR PAY, SOLELY— for PROFIT. What profit would you expect and certainly receive from the
investment?

Y.M. Personally? None. To please HER is enough.

O.M. It appears, then, that your object, primarily, WASN’T to save the girl a humiliation, but to PLEASE YOUR
MOTHER. It also appears that to please your mother gives YOU a strong pleasure. Is not that the profit which you get
out of the investment? Isn’t that the REAL profits and FIRST profit?

Y.M. Oh, well? Go on.

O.M. In ALL transactions, the Interior Master looks to it that YOU GET THE FIRST PROFIT. Otherwise there is no
transaction.

Y.M. Well, then, if I was so anxious to get that profit and so intent upon it, why did I threw it away by losing my
temper?

O.M. In order to get ANOTHER profit which suddenly superseded it in value.

Y.M. Where was it?

O.M. Ambushed behind your born temperament, and waiting for a chance. Your native warm temper suddenly jumped to the
front, and FOR THE MOMENT its influence was more powerful than your mother’s, and abolished it. In that instance you
were eager to flash out a hot rebuke and enjoy it. You did enjoy it, didn’t you?

Y.M. For — for a quarter of a second. Yes — I did.

O.M. Very well, it is as I have said: the thing which will give you the MOST pleasure, the most satisfaction, in any
moment or FRACTION of a moment, is the thing you will always do. You must content the Master’s LATEST whim, whatever it
may be.

Y.M. But when the tears came into the old servant’s eyes I could have cut my hand off for what I had done.

O.M. Right. You had humiliated YOURSELF, you see, you had given yourself PAIN. Nothing is of FIRST importance to a
man except results which damage HIM or profit him — all the rest is SECONDARY. Your Master was displeased with you,
although you had obeyed him. He required a prompt REPENTANCE; you obeyed again; you HAD to — there is never any escape
from his commands. He is a hard master and fickle; he changes his mind in the fraction of a second, but you must be
ready to obey, and you will obey, ALWAYS. If he requires repentance, you content him, you will always furnish it. He
must be nursed, petted, coddled, and kept contented, let the terms be what they may.

Y.M. Training! Oh, what’s the use of it? Didn’t I, and didn’t my mother try to train me up to where I would no
longer fly out at that girl?

O.M. Have you never managed to keep back a scolding?

Y.M. Oh, certainly — many times.

O.M. More times this year than last?

Y.M. Yes, a good many more.

O.M. More times last year than the year before?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. There is a large improvement, then, in the two years?

Y.M. Yes, undoubtedly.

O.M. Then your question is answered. You see there IS use in training. Keep on. Keeping faithfully on. You are doing
well.

Y.M. Will my reform reach perfection?

O.M. It will. UP to YOUR limit.

Y.M. My limit? What do you mean by that?

O.M. You remember that you said that I said training was EVERYTHING. I corrected you, and said “training and ANOTHER
thing.” That other thing is TEMPERAMENT— that is, the disposition you were born with. YOU CAN’T ERADICATE YOUR
DISPOSITION NOR ANY RAG OF IT— you can only put a pressure on it and keep it down and quiet. You have a warm
temper?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. You will never get rid of it; but by watching it you can keep it down nearly all the time. ITS PRESENCE IS YOUR
LIMIT. Your reform will never quite reach perfection, for your temper will beat you now and then, but you come near
enough. You have made valuable progress and can make more. There IS use in training. Immense use. Presently you will
reach a new stage of development, then your progress will be easier; will proceed on a simpler basis, anyway.

Y.M. Explain.

O.M. You keep back your scoldings now, to please YOURSELF by pleasing your MOTHER; presently the mere triumphing
over your temper will delight your vanity and confer a more delicious pleasure and satisfaction upon you than even the
approbation of your MOTHER confers upon you now. You will then labor for yourself directly and at FIRST HAND, not by
the roundabout way through your mother. It simplifies the matter, and it also strengthens the impulse.

Y.M. Ah, dear! But I sha’n’t ever reach the point where I will spare the girl for HER sake PRIMARILY, not mine?

O.M. Why — yes. In heaven.

Y.M. (AFTER A REFLECTIVE PAUSE) Temperament. Well, I see one must allow for temperament. It is a large factor, sure
enough. My mother is thoughtful, and not hot-tempered. When I was dressed I went to her room; she was not there; I
called, she answered from the bathroom. I heard the water running. I inquired. She answered, without temper, that Jane
had forgotten her bath, and she was preparing it herself. I offered to ring, but she said, “No, don’t do that; it would
only distress her to be confronted with her lapse, and would be a rebuke; she doesn’t deserve that — she is not to
blame for the tricks her memory serves her.” I say — has my mother an Interior Master? — and where was he?

O.M. He was there. There, and looking out for his own peace and pleasure and contentment. The girl’s distress would
have pained YOUR MOTHER. Otherwise the girl would have been rung up, distress and all. I know women who would have
gotten a No. 1 PLEASURE out of ringing Jane up — and so they would infallibly have pushed the button and obeyed the law
of their make and training, which are the servants of their Interior Masters. It is quite likely that a part of your
mother’s forbearance came from training. The GOOD kind of training — whose best and highest function is to see to it
that every time it confers a satisfaction upon its pupil a benefit shall fall at second hand upon others.

Y.M. If you were going to condense into an admonition your plan for the general betterment of the race’s condition,
how would you word it?

Admonition

O.M. Diligently train your ideals UPWARD and STILL UPWARD toward a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure
in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.

Y.M. Is that a new gospel?

O.M. No.

Y.M. It has been taught before?

O.M. For ten thousand years.

Y.M. By whom?

O.M. All the great religions — all the great gospels.

Y.M. Then there is nothing new about it?

O.M. Oh yes, there is. It is candidly stated, this time. That has not been done before.

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. Haven’t I put YOU FIRST, and your neighbor and the community AFTERWARD?

Y.M. Well, yes, that is a difference, it is true.

O.M. The difference between straight speaking and crooked; the difference between frankness and shuffling.

Y.M. Explain.

O.M. The others offer your a hundred bribes to be good, thus conceding that the Master inside of you must be
conciliated and contented first, and that you will do nothing at FIRST HAND but for his sake; then they turn square
around and require you to do good for OTHER’S sake CHIEFLY; and to do your duty for duty’s SAKE, chiefly; and to do
acts of SELF-SACRIFICE. Thus at the outset we all stand upon the same ground — recognition of the supreme and absolute
Monarch that resides in man, and we all grovel before him and appeal to him; then those others dodge and shuffle, and
face around and unfrankly and inconsistently and illogically change the form of their appeal and direct its persuasions
to man’s SECOND-PLACE powers and to powers which have NO EXISTENCE in him, thus advancing them to FIRST place; whereas
in my Admonition I stick logically and consistently to the original position: I place the Interior Master’s
requirements FIRST, and keep them there.

Y.M. If we grant, for the sake of argument, that your scheme and the other schemes aim at and produce the same
result — RIGHT LIVING— has yours an advantage over the others?

O.M. One, yes — a large one. It has no concealments, no deceptions. When a man leads a right and valuable life under
it he is not deceived as to the REAL chief motive which impels him to it — in those other cases he is.

Y.M. Is that an advantage? Is it an advantage to live a lofty life for a mean reason? In the other cases he lives
the lofty life under the IMPRESSION that he is living for a lofty reason. Is not that an advantage?

O.M. Perhaps so. The same advantage he might get out of thinking himself a duke, and living a duke’s life and
parading in ducal fuss and feathers, when he wasn’t a duke at all, and could find it out if he would only examine the
herald’s records.

Y.M. But anyway, he is obliged to do a duke’s part; he puts his hand in his pocket and does his benevolences on as
big a scale as he can stand, and that benefits the community.

O.M. He could do that without being a duke.

Y.M. But would he?

O.M. Don’t you see where you are arriving?

Y.M. Where?

O.M. At the standpoint of the other schemes: That it is good morals to let an ignorant duke do showy benevolences
for his pride’s sake, a pretty low motive, and go on doing them unwarned, lest if he were made acquainted with the
actual motive which prompted them he might shut up his purse and cease to be good?

Y.M. But isn’t it best to leave him in ignorance, as long as he THINKS he is doing good for others’ sake?

O.M. Perhaps so. It is the position of the other schemes. They think humbug is good enough morals when the dividend
on it is good deeds and handsome conduct.

Y.M. It is my opinion that under your scheme of a man’s doing a good deed for his OWN sake first-off, instead of
first for the GOOD DEED’S sake, no man would ever do one.

O.M. Have you committed a benevolence lately?

Y.M. Yes. This morning.

O.M. Give the particulars.

Y.M. The cabin of the old negro woman who used to nurse me when I was a child and who saved my life once at the risk
of her own, was burned last night, and she came mourning this morning, and pleading for money to build another one.

O.M. You furnished it?

Y.M. Certainly.

O.M. You were glad you had the money?

Y.M. Money? I hadn’t. I sold my horse.

O.M. You were glad you had the horse?

Y.M. Of course I was; for if I hadn’t had the horse I should have been incapable, and my MOTHER would have captured
the chance to set old Sally up.

O.M. You were cordially glad you were not caught out and incapable?

Y.M. Oh, I just was!

O.M. Now, then —

Y.M. Stop where you are! I know your whole catalog of questions, and I could answer every one of them without your
wasting the time to ask them; but I will summarize the whole thing in a single remark: I did the charity knowing it was
because the act would give ME a splendid pleasure, and because old Sally’s moving gratitude and delight would give ME
another one; and because the reflection that she would be happy now and out of her trouble would fill ME full of
happiness. I did the whole thing with my eyes open and recognizing and realizing that I was looking out for MY share of
the profits FIRST. Now then, I have confessed. Go on.

O.M. I haven’t anything to offer; you have covered the whole ground. Can you have been any MORE strongly moved to
help Sally out of her trouble — could you have done the deed any more eagerly — if you had been under the delusion that
you were doing it for HER sake and profit only?

Y.M. No! Nothing in the world could have made the impulse which moved me more powerful, more masterful, more
thoroughly irresistible. I played the limit!

O.M. Very well. You begin to suspect — and I claim to KNOW— that when a man is a shade MORE STRONGLY MOVED to do ONE
of two things or of two dozen things than he is to do any one of the OTHERS, he will infallibly do that ONE thing, be
it good or be it evil; and if it be good, not all the beguilements of all the casuistries can increase the strength of
the impulse by a single shade or add a shade to the comfort and contentment he will get out of the act.

Y.M. Then you believe that such tendency toward doing good as is in men’s hearts would not be diminished by the
removal of the delusion that good deeds are done primarily for the sake of No. 2 instead of for the sake of No. 1?

O.M. That is what I fully believe.

Y.M. Doesn’t it somehow seem to take from the dignity of the deed?

O.M. If there is dignity in falsity, it does. It removes that.

Y.M. What is left for the moralists to do?

O.M. Teach unreservedly what he already teaches with one side of his mouth and takes back with the other: Do right
FOR YOUR OWN SAKE, and be happy in knowing that your NEIGHBOR will certainly share in the benefits resulting.

Y.M. Repeat your Admonition.

O.M. DILIGENTLY TRAIN YOUR IDEALS UPWARD AND STILL UPWARD TOWARD A SUMMIT WHERE YOU WILL FIND YOUR CHIEFEST PLEASURE
IN CONDUCT WHICH, WHILE CONTENTING YOU, WILL BE SURE TO CONFER BENEFITS UPON YOUR NEIGHBOR AND THE COMMUNITY.

Y.M. One’s EVERY act proceeds from EXTERIOR INFLUENCES, you think?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. If I conclude to rob a person, I am not the ORIGINATOR of the idea, but it comes in from the OUTSIDE? I see him
handling money — for instance — and THAT moves me to the crime?

O.M. That, by itself? Oh, certainly not. It is merely the LATEST outside influence of a procession of preparatory
influences stretching back over a period of years. No SINGLE outside influence can make a man do a thing which is at
war with his training. The most it can do is to start his mind on a new tract and open it to the reception of NEW
influences — as in the case of Ignatius Loyola. In time these influences can train him to a point where it will be
consonant with his new character to yield to the FINAL influence and do that thing. I will put the case in a form which
will make my theory clear to you, I think. Here are two ingots of virgin gold. They shall represent a couple of
characters which have been refined and perfected in the virtues by years of diligent right training. Suppose you wanted
to break down these strong and well-compacted characters — what influence would you bring to bear upon the ingots?

Y.M. Work it out yourself. Proceed.

O.M. Suppose I turn upon one of them a steam-jet during a long succession of hours. Will there be a result?

Y.M. None that I know of.

O.M. Why?

Y.M. A steam-jet cannot break down such a substance.

O.M. Very well. The steam is an OUTSIDE INFLUENCE, but it is ineffective because the gold TAKES NO INTEREST IN IT.
The ingot remains as it was. Suppose we add to the steam some quicksilver in a vaporized condition, and turn the jet
upon the ingot, will there be an instantaneous result?

Y.M. No.

O.M. The QUICKSILVER is an outside influence which gold (by its peculiar nature — say TEMPERAMENT, DISPOSITION)
CANNOT BE INDIFFERENT TO. It stirs up the interest of the gold, although we do not perceive it; but a SINGLE
application of the influence works no damage. Let us continue the application in a steady stream, and call each minute
a year. By the end of ten or twenty minutes — ten or twenty years — the little ingot is sodden with quicksilver, its
virtues are gone, its character is degraded. At last it is ready to yield to a temptation which it would have taken no
notice of, ten or twenty years ago. We will apply that temptation in the form of a pressure of my finger. You note the
result?

Y.M. Yes; the ingot has crumbled to sand. I understand, now. It is not the SINGLE outside influence that does the
work, but only the LAST one of a long and disintegrating accumulation of them. I see, now, how my SINGLE impulse to rob
the man is not the one that makes me do it, but only the LAST one of a preparatory series. You might illustrate with a
parable.

A Parable

O.M. I will. There was once a pair of New England boys — twins. They were alike in good dispositions, feckless
morals, and personal appearance. They were the models of the Sunday-school. At fifteen George had the opportunity to go
as cabin-boy in a whale-ship, and sailed away for the Pacific. Henry remained at home in the village. At eighteen
George was a sailor before the mast, and Henry was teacher of the advanced Bible class. At twenty-two George, through
fighting-habits and drinking-habits acquired at sea and in the sailor boarding-houses of the European and Oriental
ports, was a common rough in Hong–Kong, and out of a job; and Henry was superintendent of the Sunday-school. At
twenty-six George was a wanderer, a tramp, and Henry was pastor of the village church. Then George came home, and was
Henry’s guest. One evening a man passed by and turned down the lane, and Henry said, with a pathetic smile, “Without
intending me a discomfort, that man is always keeping me reminded of my pinching poverty, for he carries heaps of money
about him, and goes by here every evening of his life.” That OUTSIDE INFLUENCE— that remark — was enough for George,
but IT was not the one that made him ambush the man and rob him, it merely represented the eleven years’ accumulation
of such influences, and gave birth to the act for which their long gestation had made preparation. It had never entered
the head of Henry to rob the man — his ingot had been subjected to clean steam only; but George’s had been subjected to
vaporized quicksilver.

V

More About the Machine

Note. — When Mrs. W. asks how can a millionaire give a single dollar to colleges and museums while one human being
is destitute of bread, she has answered her question herself. Her feeling for the poor shows that she has a standard of
benevolence; there she has conceded the millionaire’s privilege of having a standard; since she evidently requires him
to adopt her standard, she is by that act requiring herself to adopt his. The human being always looks down when he is
examining another person’s standard; he never find one that he has to examine by looking up.

The Man–Machine Again

Young Man. You really think man is a mere machine?

Old Man. I do.

Y.M. And that his mind works automatically and is independent of his control — carries on thought on its own
hook?

O.M. Yes. It is diligently at work, unceasingly at work, during every waking moment. Have you never tossed about all
night, imploring, beseeching, commanding your mind to stop work and let you go to sleep? — you who perhaps imagine that
your mind is your servant and must obey your orders, think what you tell it to think, and stop when you tell it to
stop. When it chooses to work, there is no way to keep it still for an instant. The brightest man would not be able to
supply it with subjects if he had to hunt them up. If it needed the man’s help it would wait for him to give it work
when he wakes in the morning.

Y.M. Maybe it does.

O.M. No, it begins right away, before the man gets wide enough awake to give it a suggestion. He may go to sleep
saying, “The moment I wake I will think upon such and such a subject,” but he will fail. His mind will be too quick for
him; by the time he has become nearly enough awake to be half conscious, he will find that it is already at work upon
another subject. Make the experiment and see.

Y.M. At any rate, he can make it stick to a subject if he wants to.

O.M. Not if it find another that suits it better. As a rule it will listen to neither a dull speaker nor a bright
one. It refuses all persuasion. The dull speaker wearies it and sends it far away in idle dreams; the bright speaker
throws out stimulating ideas which it goes chasing after and is at once unconscious of him and his talk. You cannot
keep your mind from wandering, if it wants to; it is master, not you.

After an Interval of Days

O.M. Now, dreams — but we will examine that later. Meantime, did you try commanding your mind to wait for orders
from you, and not do any thinking on its own hook?

Y.M. Yes, I commanded it to stand ready to take orders when I should wake in the morning.

O.M. Did it obey?

Y.M. No. It went to thinking of something of its own initiation, without waiting for me. Also — as you suggested —
at night I appointed a theme for it to begin on in the morning, and commanded it to begin on that one and no other.

O.M. Did it obey?

Y.M. No.

O.M. How many times did you try the experiment?

Y.M. Ten.

O.M. How many successes did you score?

Y.M. Not one.

O.M. It is as I have said: the mind is independent of the man. He has no control over it; it does as it pleases. It
will take up a subject in spite of him; it will stick to it in spite of him; it will throw it aside in spite of him. It
is entirely independent of him.

Y.M. Go on. Illustrate.

O.M. Do you know chess?

Y.M. I learned it a week ago.

O.M. Did your mind go on playing the game all night that first night?

Y.M. Don’t mention it!

O.M. It was eagerly, unsatisfiably interested; it rioted in the combinations; you implored it to drop the game and
let you get some sleep?

Y.M. Yes. It wouldn’t listen; it played right along. It wore me out and I got up haggard and wretched in the
morning.

O.M. At some time or other you have been captivated by a ridiculous rhyme-jingle?

Y.M. Indeed, yes!

“I saw Esau kissing Kate, And she saw I saw Esau; I saw Esau, he saw Kate, And she saw — ”

And so on. My mind went mad with joy over it. It repeated it all day and all night for a week in spite of all I
could do to stop it, and it seemed to me that I must surely go crazy.

O.M. And the new popular song?

Y.M. Oh yes! “In the Swee-eet By and By”; etc. Yes, the new popular song with the taking melody sings through one’s
head day and night, asleep and awake, till one is a wreck. There is no getting the mind to let it alone.

O.M. Yes, asleep as well as awake. The mind is quite independent. It is master. You have nothing to do with it. It
is so apart from you that it can conduct its affairs, sing its songs, play its chess, weave its complex and ingeniously
constructed dreams, while you sleep. It has no use for your help, no use for your guidance, and never uses either,
whether you be asleep or awake. You have imagined that you could originate a thought in your mind, and you have
sincerely believed you could do it.

Y.M. Yes, I have had that idea.

O.M. Yet you can’t originate a dream-thought for it to work out, and get it accepted?

Y.M. No.

O.M. And you can’t dictate its procedure after it has originated a dream-thought for itself?

Y.M. No. No one can do it. Do you think the waking mind and the dream mind are the same machine?

O.M. There is argument for it. We have wild and fantastic day-thoughts? Things that are dream-like?

Y.M. Yes — like Mr. Wells’s man who invented a drug that made him invisible; and like the Arabian tales of the
Thousand Nights.

O.M. And there are dreams that are rational, simple, consistent, and unfantastic?

Y.M. Yes. I have dreams that are like that. Dreams that are just like real life; dreams in which there are several
persons with distinctly differentiated characters — inventions of my mind and yet strangers to me: a vulgar person; a
refined one; a wise person; a fool; a cruel person; a kind and compassionate one; a quarrelsome person; a peacemaker;
old persons and young; beautiful girls and homely ones. They talk in character, each preserves his own characteristics.
There are vivid fights, vivid and biting insults, vivid love-passages; there are tragedies and comedies, there are
griefs that go to one’s heart, there are sayings and doings that make you laugh: indeed, the whole thing is exactly
like real life.

O.M. Your dreaming mind originates the scheme, consistently and artistically develops it, and carries the little
drama creditably through — all without help or suggestion from you?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. It is argument that it could do the like awake without help or suggestion from you — and I think it does. It is
argument that it is the same old mind in both cases, and never needs your help. I think the mind is purely a machine, a
thoroughly independent machine, an automatic machine. Have you tried the other experiment which I suggested to you?

Y.M. Which one?

O.M. The one which was to determine how much influence you have over your mind — if any.

Y.M. Yes, and got more or less entertainment out of it. I did as you ordered: I placed two texts before my eyes —
one a dull one and barren of interest, the other one full of interest, inflamed with it, white-hot with it. I commanded
my mind to busy itself solely with the dull one.

O.M. Did it obey?

Y.M. Well, no, it didn’t. It busied itself with the other one.

O.M. Did you try hard to make it obey?

Y.M. Yes, I did my honest best.

O.M. What was the text which it refused to be interested in or think about?

Y.M. It was this question: If A owes B a dollar and a half, and B owes C two and three-quarter, and C owes A
thirty-five cents, and D and A together owe E and B three-sixteenths of — of — I don’t remember the rest, now, but
anyway it was wholly uninteresting, and I could not force my mind to stick to it even half a minute at a time; it kept
flying off to the other text.

O.M. What was the other text?

Y.M. It is no matter about that.

O.M. But what was it?

Y.M. A photograph.

O.M. Your own?

Y.M. No. It was hers.

O.M. You really made an honest good test. Did you make a second trial?

Y.M. Yes. I commanded my mind to interest itself in the morning paper’s report of the pork-market, and at the same
time I reminded it of an experience of mine of sixteen years ago. It refused to consider the pork and gave its whole
blazing interest to that ancient incident.

O.M. What was the incident?

Y.M. An armed desperado slapped my face in the presence of twenty spectators. It makes me wild and murderous every
time I think of it.

O.M. Good tests, both; very good tests. Did you try my other suggestion?

Y.M. The one which was to prove to me that if I would leave my mind to its own devices it would find things to think
about without any of my help, and thus convince me that it was a machine, an automatic machine, set in motion by
exterior influences, and as independent of me as it could be if it were in some one else’s skull. Is that the one?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. I tried it. I was shaving. I had slept well, and my mind was very lively, even gay and frisky. It was reveling
in a fantastic and joyful episode of my remote boyhood which had suddenly flashed up in my memory — moved to this by
the spectacle of a yellow cat picking its way carefully along the top of the garden wall. The color of this cat brought
the bygone cat before me, and I saw her walking along the side-step of the pulpit; saw her walk on to a large sheet of
sticky fly-paper and get all her feet involved; saw her struggle and fall down, helpless and dissatisfied, more and
more urgent, more and more unreconciled, more and more mutely profane; saw the silent congregation quivering like
jelly, and the tears running down their faces. I saw it all. The sight of the tears whisked my mind to a far distant
and a sadder scene — in Terra del Fuego — and with Darwin’s eyes I saw a naked great savage hurl his little boy against
the rocks for a trifling fault; saw the poor mother gather up her dying child and hug it to her breast and weep,
uttering no word. Did my mind stop to mourn with that nude black sister of mine? No — it was far away from that scene
in an instant, and was busying itself with an ever-recurring and disagreeable dream of mine. In this dream I always
find myself, stripped to my shirt, cringing and dodging about in the midst of a great drawing-room throng of finely
dressed ladies and gentlemen, and wondering how I got there. And so on and so on, picture after picture, incident after
incident, a drifting panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any help from me
— why, it would take me two hours to merely name the multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in
fifteen minutes, let alone describe them to you.

O.M. A man’s mind, left free, has no use for his help. But there is one way whereby he can get its help when he
desires it.

Y.M. What is that way?

O.M. When your mind is racing along from subject to subject and strikes an inspiring one, open your mouth and begin
talking upon that matter — or — take your pen and use that. It will interest your mind and concentrate it, and it will
pursue the subject with satisfaction. It will take full charge, and furnish the words itself.

Y.M. But don’t I tell it what to say?

O.M. There are certainly occasions when you haven’t time. The words leap out before you know what is coming.

Y.M. For instance?

O.M. Well, take a “flash of wit” — repartee. Flash is the right word. It is out instantly. There is no time to
arrange the words. There is no thinking, no reflecting. Where there is a wit-mechanism it is automatic in its action
and needs no help. Where the wit-mechanism is lacking, no amount of study and reflection can manufacture the
product.

Y.M. You really think a man originates nothing, creates nothing.

The Thinking–Process

O.M. I do. Men perceive, and their brain-machines automatically combine the things perceived. That is all.

Y.M. The steam-engine?

O.M. It takes fifty men a hundred years to invent it. One meaning of invent is discover. I use the word in that
sense. Little by little they discover and apply the multitude of details that go to make the perfect engine. Watt
noticed that confined steam was strong enough to lift the lid of the teapot. He didn’t create the idea, he merely
discovered the fact; the cat had noticed it a hundred times. From the teapot he evolved the cylinder — from the
displaced lid he evolved the piston-rod. To attach something to the piston-rod to be moved by it, was a simple matter —
crank and wheel. And so there was a working engine. 1

One by one, improvements were discovered by men who used their eyes, not their creating powers — for they hadn’t any
— and now, after a hundred years the patient contributions of fifty or a hundred observers stand compacted in the
wonderful machine which drives the ocean liner.

Y.M. A Shakespearean play?

O.M. The process is the same. The first actor was a savage. He reproduced in his theatrical war-dances,
scalp-dances, and so on, incidents which he had seen in real life. A more advanced civilization produced more
incidents, more episodes; the actor and the story-teller borrowed them. And so the drama grew, little by little, stage
by stage. It is made up of the facts of life, not creations. It took centuries to develop the Greek drama. It borrowed
from preceding ages; it lent to the ages that came after. Men observe and combine, that is all. So does a rat.

Y.M. How?

O.M. He observes a smell, he infers a cheese, he seeks and finds. The astronomer observes this and that; adds his
this and that to the this-and-thats of a hundred predecessors, infers an invisible planet, seeks it and finds it. The
rat gets into a trap; gets out with trouble; infers that cheese in traps lacks value, and meddles with that trap no
more. The astronomer is very proud of his achievement, the rat is proud of his. Yet both are machines; they have done
machine work, they have originated nothing, they have no right to be vain; the whole credit belongs to their Maker.
They are entitled to no honors, no praises, no monuments when they die, no remembrance. One is a complex and elaborate
machine, the other a simple and limited machine, but they are alike in principle, function, and process, and neither of
them works otherwise than automatically, and neither of them may righteously claim a PERSONAL superiority or a personal
dignity above the other.

Y.M. In earned personal dignity, then, and in personal merit for what he does, it follows of necessity that he is on
the same level as a rat?

O.M. His brother the rat; yes, that is how it seems to me. Neither of them being entitled to any personal merit for
what he does, it follows of necessity that neither of them has a right to arrogate to himself (personally created)
superiorities over his brother.

Y.M. Are you determined to go on believing in these insanities? Would you go on believing in them in the face of
able arguments backed by collated facts and instances?

O.M. I have been a humble, earnest, and sincere Truth–Seeker.

Y.M. Very well?

O.M. The humble, earnest, and sincere Truth–Seeker is always convertible by such means.

Y.M. I am thankful to God to hear you say this, for now I know that your conversion —

O.M. Wait. You misunderstand. I said I have BEEN a Truth–Seeker.

Y.M. Well?

O.M. I am not that now. Have your forgotten? I told you that there are none but temporary Truth–Seekers; that a
permanent one is a human impossibility; that as soon as the Seeker finds what he is thoroughly convinced is the Truth,
he seeks no further, but gives the rest of his days to hunting junk to patch it and caulk it and prop it with, and make
it weather-proof and keep it from caving in on him. Hence the Presbyterian remains a Presbyterian, the Mohammedan a
Mohammedan, the Spiritualist a Spiritualist, the Democrat a Democrat, the Republican a Republican, the Monarchist a
Monarchist; and if a humble, earnest, and sincere Seeker after Truth should find it in the proposition that the moon is
made of green cheese nothing could ever budge him from that position; for he is nothing but an automatic machine, and
must obey the laws of his construction.

Y.M. After so —

O.M. Having found the Truth; perceiving that beyond question man has but one moving impulse — the contenting of his
own spirit — and is merely a machine and entitled to no personal merit for anything he does, it is not humanly possible
for me to seek further. The rest of my days will be spent in patching and painting and puttying and caulking my
priceless possession and in looking the other way when an imploring argument or a damaging fact approaches.

1 The Marquess of Worcester had done all of this more than a
century earlier.

VI

Instinct and Thought

Young Man. It is odious. Those drunken theories of yours, advanced a while ago — concerning the rat and all that —
strip Man bare of all his dignities, grandeurs, sublimities.

Old Man. He hasn’t any to strip — they are shams, stolen clothes. He claims credits which belong solely to his
Maker.

Y.M. But you have no right to put him on a level with a rat.

O.M. I don’t — morally. That would not be fair to the rat. The rat is well above him, there.

Y.M. Are you joking?

O.M. No, I am not.

Y.M. Then what do you mean?

O.M. That comes under the head of the Moral Sense. It is a large question. Let us finish with what we are about now,
before we take it up.

Y.M. Very well. You have seemed to concede that you place Man and the rat on A level. What is it? The
intellectual?

O.M. In form — not a degree.

Y.M. Explain.

O.M. I think that the rat’s mind and the man’s mind are the same machine, but of unequal capacities — like yours and
Edison’s; like the African pygmy’s and Homer’s; like the Bushman’s and Bismarck’s.

Y.M. How are you going to make that out, when the lower animals have no mental quality but instinct, while man
possesses reason?

O.M. What is instinct?

Y.M. It is merely unthinking and mechanical exercise of inherited habit.

O.M. What originated the habit?

Y.M. The first animal started it, its descendants have inherited it.

O.M. How did the first one come to start it?

Y.M. I don’t know; but it didn’t THINK it out.

O.M. How do you know it didn’t?

Y.M. Well — I have a right to suppose it didn’t, anyway.

O.M. I don’t believe you have. What is thought?

Y.M. I know what you call it: the mechanical and automatic putting together of impressions received from outside,
and drawing an inference from them.

O.M. Very good. Now my idea of the meaningless term “instinct” is, that it is merely PETRIFIED THOUGHT; solidified
and made inanimate by habit; thought which was once alive and awake, but it become unconscious — walks in its sleep, so
to speak.

Y.M. Illustrate it.

O.M. Take a herd of cows, feeding in a pasture. Their heads are all turned in one direction. They do that
instinctively; they gain nothing by it, they have no reason for it, they don’t know why they do it. It is an inherited
habit which was originally thought — that is to say, observation of an exterior fact, and a valuable inference drawn
from that observation and confirmed by experience. The original wild ox noticed that with the wind in his favor he
could smell his enemy in time to escape; then he inferred that it was worth while to keep his nose to the wind. That is
the process which man calls reasoning. Man’s thought-machine works just like the other animals’, but it is a better one
and more Edisonian. Man, in the ox’s place, would go further, reason wider: he would face part of the herd the other
way and protect both front and rear.

Y.M. Did you stay the term instinct is meaningless?

O.M. I think it is a bastard word. I think it confuses us; for as a rule it applies itself to habits and impulses
which had a far-off origin in thought, and now and then breaks the rule and applies itself to habits which can hardly
claim a thought-origin.

Y.M. Give an instance.

O.M. Well, in putting on trousers a man always inserts the same old leg first — never the other one. There is no
advantage in that, and no sense in it. All men do it, yet no man thought it out and adopted it of set purpose, I
imagine. But it is a habit which is transmitted, no doubt, and will continue to be transmitted.

Y.M. Can you prove that the habit exists?

O.M. You can prove it, if you doubt. If you will take a man to a clothing-store and watch him try on a dozen pairs
of trousers, you will see.

Y.M. The cow illustration is not —

O.M. Sufficient to show that a dumb animal’s mental machine is just the same as a man’s and its reasoning processes
the same? I will illustrate further. If you should hand Mr. Edison a box which you caused to fly open by some concealed
device he would infer a spring, and would hunt for it and find it. Now an uncle of mine had an old horse who used to
get into the closed lot where the corn-crib was and dishonestly take the corn. I got the punishment myself, as it was
supposed that I had heedlessly failed to insert the wooden pin which kept the gate closed. These persistent punishments
fatigued me; they also caused me to infer the existence of a culprit, somewhere; so I hid myself and watched the gate.
Presently the horse came and pulled the pin out with his teeth and went in. Nobody taught him that; he had observed —
then thought it out for himself. His process did not differ from Edison’s; he put this and that together and drew an
inference — and the peg, too; but I made him sweat for it.

Y.M. It has something of the seeming of thought about it. Still it is not very elaborate. Enlarge.

O.M. Suppose Mr. Edison has been enjoying some one’s hospitalities. He comes again by and by, and the house is
vacant. He infers that his host has moved. A while afterward, in another town, he sees the man enter a house; he infers
that that is the new home, and follows to inquire. Here, now, is the experience of a gull, as related by a naturalist.
The scene is a Scotch fishing village where the gulls were kindly treated. This particular gull visited a cottage; was
fed; came next day and was fed again; came into the house, next time, and ate with the family; kept on doing this
almost daily, thereafter. But, once the gull was away on a journey for a few days, and when it returned the house was
vacant. Its friends had removed to a village three miles distant. Several months later it saw the head of the family on
the street there, followed him home, entered the house without excuse or apology, and became a daily guest again. Gulls
do not rank high mentally, but this one had memory and the reasoning faculty, you see, and applied them
Edisonially.

Y.M. Yet it was not an Edison and couldn’t be developed into one.

O.M. Perhaps not. Could you?

Y.M. That is neither here nor there. Go on.

O.M. If Edison were in trouble and a stranger helped him out of it and next day he got into the same difficulty
again, he would infer the wise thing to do in case he knew the stranger’s address. Here is a case of a bird and a
stranger as related by a naturalist. An Englishman saw a bird flying around about his dog’s head, down in the grounds,
and uttering cries of distress. He went there to see about it. The dog had a young bird in his mouth — unhurt. The
gentleman rescued it and put it on a bush and brought the dog away. Early the next morning the mother bird came for the
gentleman, who was sitting on his veranda, and by its maneuvers persuaded him to follow it to a distant part of the
grounds — flying a little way in front of him and waiting for him to catch up, and so on; and keeping to the winding
path, too, instead of flying the near way across lots. The distance covered was four hundred yards. The same dog was
the culprit; he had the young bird again, and once more he had to give it up. Now the mother bird had reasoned it all
out: since the stranger had helped her once, she inferred that he would do it again; she knew where to find him, and
she went upon her errand with confidence. Her mental processes were what Edison’s would have been. She put this and
that together — and that is all that thought IS— and out of them built her logical arrangement of inferences. Edison
couldn’t have done it any better himself.

Y.M. Do you believe that many of the dumb animals can think?

O.M. Yes — the elephant, the monkey, the horse, the dog, the parrot, the macaw, the mocking-bird, and many others.
The elephant whose mate fell into a pit, and who dumped dirt and rubbish into the pit till bottom was raised high
enough to enable the captive to step out, was equipped with the reasoning quality. I conceive that all animals that can
learn things through teaching and drilling have to know how to observe, and put this and that together and draw an
inference — the process of thinking. Could you teach an idiot of manuals of arms, and to advance, retreat, and go
through complex field maneuvers at the word of command?

Y.M. Not if he were a thorough idiot.

O.M. Well, canary-birds can learn all that; dogs and elephants learn all sorts of wonderful things. They must surely
be able to notice, and to put things together, and say to themselves, “I get the idea, now: when I do so and so, as per
order, I am praised and fed; when I do differently I am punished.” Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a
Congressman can.

Y.M. Granting, then, that dumb animals are able to think upon a low plane, is there any that can think upon a high
one? Is there one that is well up toward man?

O.M. Yes. As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in
several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the
reach of any man, savage or civilized!

Y.M. Oh, come! you are abolishing the intellectual frontier which separates man and beast.

O.M. I beg your pardon. One cannot abolish what does not exist.

Y.M. You are not in earnest, I hope. You cannot mean to seriously say there is no such frontier.

O.M. I do say it seriously. The instances of the horse, the gull, the mother bird, and the elephant show that those
creatures put their this’s and thats together just as Edison would have done it and drew the same inferences that he
would have drawn. Their mental machinery was just like his, also its manner of working. Their equipment was as inferior
to the Strasburg clock, but that is the only difference — there is no frontier.

Y.M. It looks exasperatingly true; and is distinctly offensive. It elevates the dumb beasts to — to —

O.M. Let us drop that lying phrase, and call them the Unrevealed Creatures; so far as we can know, there is no such
thing as a dumb beast.

Y.M. On what grounds do you make that assertion?

O.M. On quite simple ones. “Dumb” beast suggests an animal that has no thought-machinery, no understanding, no
speech, no way of communicating what is in its mind. We know that a hen HAS speech. We cannot understand everything she
says, but we easily learn two or three of her phrases. We know when she is saying, “I have laid an egg”; we know when
she is saying to the chicks, “Run here, dears, I’ve found a worm”; we know what she is saying when she voices a
warning: “Quick! hurry! gather yourselves under mamma, there’s a hawk coming!” We understand the cat when she stretches
herself out, purring with affection and contentment and lifts up a soft voice and says, “Come, kitties, supper’s
ready”; we understand her when she goes mourning about and says, “Where can they be? They are lost. Won’t you help me
hunt for them?” and we understand the disreputable Tom when he challenges at midnight from his shed, “You come over
here, you product of immoral commerce, and I’ll make your fur fly!” We understand a few of a dog’s phrases and we learn
to understand a few of the remarks and gestures of any bird or other animal that we domesticate and observe. The
clearness and exactness of the few of the hen’s speeches which we understand is argument that she can communicate to
her kind a hundred things which we cannot comprehend — in a word, that she can converse. And this argument is also
applicable in the case of others of the great army of the Unrevealed. It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to
call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. Now as to the ant —

Y.M. Yes, go back to the ant, the creature that — as you seem to think — sweeps away the last vestige of an
intellectual frontier between man and the Unrevealed.

O.M. That is what she surely does. In all his history the aboriginal Australian never thought out a house for
himself and built it. The ant is an amazing architect. She is a wee little creature, but she builds a strong and
enduring house eight feet high — a house which is as large in proportion to her size as is the largest capitol or
cathedral in the world compared to man’s size. No savage race has produced architects who could approach the air in
genius or culture. No civilized race has produced architects who could plan a house better for the uses proposed than
can hers. Her house contains a throne-room; nurseries for her young; granaries; apartments for her soldiers, her
workers, etc.; and they and the multifarious halls and corridors which communicate with them are arranged and
distributed with an educated and experienced eye for convenience and adaptability.

Y.M. That could be mere instinct.

O.M. It would elevate the savage if he had it. But let us look further before we decide. The ant has soldiers —
battalions, regiments, armies; and they have their appointed captains and generals, who lead them to battle.

Y.M. That could be instinct, too.

O.M. We will look still further. The ant has a system of government; it is well planned, elaborate, and is well
carried on.

Y.M. Instinct again.

O.M. She has crowds of slaves, and is a hard and unjust employer of forced labor.

O.M. The ant discriminates between friend and stranger. Sir John Lubbock took ants from two different nests, made
them drunk with whiskey and laid them, unconscious, by one of the nests, near some water. Ants from the nest came and
examined and discussed these disgraced creatures, then carried their friends home and threw the strangers overboard.
Sir John repeated the experiment a number of times. For a time the sober ants did as they had done at first — carried
their friends home and threw the strangers overboard. But finally they lost patience, seeing that their reformatory
efforts went for nothing, and threw both friends and strangers overboard. Come — is this instinct, or is it thoughtful
and intelligent discussion of a thing new — absolutely new — to their experience; with a verdict arrived at, sentence
passed, and judgment executed? Is it instinct? — thought petrified by ages of habit — or isn’t it brand-new thought,
inspired by the new occasion, the new circumstances?

Y.M. I have to concede it. It was not a result of habit; it has all the look of reflection, thought, putting this
and that together, as you phrase it. I believe it was thought.

O.M. I will give you another instance of thought. Franklin had a cup of sugar on a table in his room. The ants got
at it. He tried several preventives; and ants rose superior to them. Finally he contrived one which shut off access —
probably set the table’s legs in pans of water, or drew a circle of tar around the cup, I don’t remember. At any rate,
he watched to see what they would do. They tried various schemes — failures, every one. The ants were badly puzzled.
Finally they held a consultation, discussed the problem, arrived at a decision — and this time they beat that great
philosopher. They formed in procession, cross the floor, climbed the wall, marched across the ceiling to a point just
over the cup, then one by one they let go and fell down into it! Was that instinct — thought petrified by ages of
inherited habit?

Y.M. No, I don’t believe it was. I believe it was a newly reasoned scheme to meet a new emergency.

O.M. Very well. You have conceded the reasoning power in two instances. I come now to a mental detail wherein the
ant is a long way the superior of any human being. Sir John Lubbock proved by many experiments that an ant knows a
stranger ant of her own species in a moment, even when the stranger is disguised — with paint. Also he proved that an
ant knows every individual in her hive of five hundred thousand souls. Also, after a year’s absence one of the five
hundred thousand she will straightway recognize the returned absentee and grace the recognition with a affectionate
welcome. How are these recognitions made? Not by color, for painted ants were recognized. Not by smell, for ants that
had been dipped in chloroform were recognized. Not by speech and not by antennae signs nor contacts, for the drunken
and motionless ants were recognized and the friend discriminated from the stranger. The ants were all of the same
species, therefore the friends had to be recognized by form and feature — friends who formed part of a hive of five
hundred thousand! Has any man a memory for form and feature approaching that?

Y.M. Certainly not.

O.M. Franklin’s ants and Lubbuck’s ants show fine capacities of putting this and that together in new and untried
emergencies and deducting smart conclusions from the combinations — a man’s mental process exactly. With memory to
help, man preserves his observations and reasonings, reflects upon them, adds to them, recombines, and so proceeds,
stage by stage, to far results — from the teakettle to the ocean greyhound’s complex engine; from personal labor to
slave labor; from wigwam to palace; from the capricious chase to agriculture and stored food; from nomadic life to
stable government and concentrated authority; from incoherent hordes to massed armies. The ant has observation, the
reasoning faculty, and the preserving adjunct of a prodigious memory; she has duplicated man’s development and the
essential features of his civilization, and you call it all instinct!

Y.M. Perhaps I lacked the reasoning faculty myself.

O.M. Well, don’t tell anybody, and don’t do it again.

Y.M. We have come a good way. As a result — as I understand it — I am required to concede that there is absolutely
no intellectual frontier separating Man and the Unrevealed Creatures?

O.M. That is what you are required to concede. There is no such frontier — there is no way to get around that. Man
has a finer and more capable machine in him than those others, but it is the same machine and works in the same way.
And neither he nor those others can command the machine — it is strictly automatic, independent of control, works when
it pleases, and when it doesn’t please, it can’t be forced.

Y.M. Then man and the other animals are all alike, as to mental machinery, and there isn’t any difference of any
stupendous magnitude between them, except in quality, not in kind.

O.M. That is about the state of it — intellectuality. There are pronounced limitations on both sides. We can’t learn
to understand much of their language, but the dog, the elephant, etc., learn to understand a very great deal of ours.
To that extent they are our superiors. On the other hand, they can’t learn reading, writing, etc., nor any of our fine
and high things, and there we have a large advantage over them.

Y.M. Very well, let them have what they’ve got, and welcome; there is still a wall, and a lofty one. They haven’t
got the Moral Sense; we have it, and it lifts us immeasurably above them.

O.M. What makes you think that?

Y.M. Now look here — let’s call a halt. I have stood the other infamies and insanities and that is enough; I am not
going to have man and the other animals put on the same level morally.

O.M. I wasn’t going to hoist man up to that.

Y.M. This is too much! I think it is not right to jest about such things.

O.M. I am not jesting, I am merely reflecting a plain and simple truth — and without uncharitableness. The fact that
man knows right from wrong proves his INTELLECTUAL superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can DO
wrong proves his MORAL inferiority to any creature that CANNOT. It is my belief that this position is not
assailable.

Free Will

Y.M. What is your opinion regarding Free Will?

O.M. That there is no such thing. Did the man possess it who gave the old woman his last shilling and trudged home
in the storm?

Y.M. He had the choice between succoring the old woman and leaving her to suffer. Isn’t it so?

O.M. Yes, there was a choice to be made, between bodily comfort on the one hand and the comfort of the spirit on the
other. The body made a strong appeal, of course — the body would be quite sure to do that; the spirit made a counter
appeal. A choice had to be made between the two appeals, and was made. Who or what determined that choice?

Y.M. Any one but you would say that the man determined it, and that in doing it he exercised Free Will.

O.M. We are constantly assured that every man is endowed with Free Will, and that he can and must exercise it where
he is offered a choice between good conduct and less-good conduct. Yet we clearly saw that in that man’s case he really
had no Free Will: his temperament, his training, and the daily influences which had molded him and made him what he
was, COMPELLED him to rescue the old woman and thus save HIMSELF— save himself from spiritual pain, from unendurable
wretchedness. He did not make the choice, it was made FOR him by forces which he could not control. Free Will has
always existed in WORDS, but it stops there, I think — stops short of FACT. I would not use those words — Free Will —
but others.

Y.M. What others?

O.M. Free Choice.

Y.M. What is the difference?

O.M. The one implies untrammeled power to ACT as you please, the other implies nothing beyond a mere MENTAL PROCESS:
the critical ability to determine which of two things is nearest right and just.

Y.M. Make the difference clear, please.

O.M. The mind can freely SELECT, CHOOSE, POINT OUT the right and just one — its function stops there. It can go no
further in the matter. It has no authority to say that the right one shall be acted upon and the wrong one discarded.
That authority is in other hands.

Y.M. The man’s?

O.M. In the machine which stands for him. In his born disposition and the character which has been built around it
by training and environment.

Y.M. It will act upon the right one of the two?

O.M. It will do as it pleases in the matter. George Washington’s machine would act upon the right one; Pizarro would
act upon the wrong one.

Y.M. Then as I understand it a bad man’s mental machinery calmly and judicially points out which of two things is
right and just —

O.M. Yes, and his MORAL machinery will freely act upon the other or the other, according to its make, and be quite
indifferent to the MIND’S feeling concerning the matter — that is, WOULD be, if the mind had any feelings; which it
hasn’t. It is merely a thermometer: it registers the heat and the cold, and cares not a farthing about either.

Y.M. Then we must not claim that if a man KNOWS which of two things is right he is absolutely BOUND to do that
thing?

O.M. His temperament and training will decide what he shall do, and he will do it; he cannot help himself, he has no
authority over the mater. Wasn’t it right for David to go out and slay Goliath?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Then it would have been equally RIGHT for any one else to do it?

Y.M. Certainly.

O.M. Then it would have been RIGHT for a born coward to attempt it?

Y.M. It would — yes.

O.M. You know that no born coward ever would have attempted it, don’t you?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. You know that a born coward’s make and temperament would be an absolute and insurmountable bar to his ever
essaying such a thing, don’t you?

Y.M. Yes, I know it.

O.M. He clearly perceives that it would be RIGHT to try it?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. His mind has Free Choice in determining that it would be RIGHT to try it?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Then if by reason of his inborn cowardice he simply can NOT essay it, what becomes of his Free Will? Where is
his Free Will? Why claim that he has Free Will when the plain facts show that he hasn’t? Why content that because he
and David SEE the right alike, both must ACT alike? Why impose the same laws upon goat and lion?

Y.M. There is really no such thing as Free Will?

O.M. It is what I think. There is WILL. But it has nothing to do with INTELLECTUAL PERCEPTIONS OF RIGHT AND WRONG,
and is not under their command. David’s temperament and training had Will, and it was a compulsory force; David had to
obey its decrees, he had no choice. The coward’s temperament and training possess Will, and IT is compulsory; it
commands him to avoid danger, and he obeys, he has no choice. But neither the Davids nor the cowards possess Free Will
— will that may do the right or do the wrong, as their MENTAL verdict shall decide.

Not Two Values, But Only One

Y.M. There is one thing which bothers me: I can’t tell where you draw the line between MATERIAL covetousness and
SPIRITUAL covetousness.

O.M. I don’t draw any.

Y.M. How do you mean?

O.M. There is no such thing as MATERIAL covetousness. All covetousness is spiritual.

Y.M. ALL longings, desires, ambitions SPIRITUAL, never material?

O.M. Yes. The Master in you requires that in ALL cases you shall content his SPIRIT— that alone. He never requires
anything else, he never interests himself in any other matter.

Y.M. Ah, come! When he covets somebody’s money — isn’t that rather distinctly material and gross?

O.M. No. The money is merely a symbol — it represents in visible and concrete form a SPIRITUAL DESIRE. Any so-called
material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for ITSELF, but because it will content your spirit
for the moment.

Y.M. Please particularize.

O.M. Very well. Maybe the thing longed for is a new hat. You get it and your vanity is pleased, your spirit
contented. Suppose your friends deride the hat, make fun of it: at once it loses its value; you are ashamed of it, you
put it out of your sight, you never want to see it again.

Y.M. I think I see. Go on.

O.M. It is the same hat, isn’t it? It is in no way altered. But it wasn’t the HAT you wanted, but only what it stood
for — a something to please and content your SPIRIT. When it failed of that, the whole of its value was gone. There are
no MATERIAL values; there are only spiritual ones. You will hunt in vain for a material value that is ACTUAL, REAL—
there is no such thing. The only value it possesses, for even a moment, is the spiritual value back of it: remove that
end and it is at once worthless — like the hat.

Y.M. Can you extend that to money?

O.M. Yes. It is merely a symbol, it has no MATERIAL value; you think you desire it for its own sake, but it is not
so. You desire it for the spiritual content it will bring; if it fail of that, you discover that its value is gone.
There is that pathetic tale of the man who labored like a slave, unresting, unsatisfied, until he had accumulated a
fortune, and was happy over it, jubilant about it; then in a single week a pestilence swept away all whom he held dear
and left him desolate. His money’s value was gone. He realized that his joy in it came not from the money itself, but
from the spiritual contentment he got out of his family’s enjoyment of the pleasures and delights it lavished upon
them. Money has no MATERIAL value; if you remove its spiritual value nothing is left but dross. It is so with all
things, little or big, majestic or trivial — there are no exceptions. Crowns, scepters, pennies, paste jewels, village
notoriety, world-wide fame — they are all the same, they have no MATERIAL value: while they content the SPIRIT they are
precious, when this fails they are worthless.

A Difficult Question

Y.M. You keep me confused and perplexed all the time by your elusive terminology. Sometimes you divide a man up into
two or three separate personalities, each with authorities, jurisdictions, and responsibilities of its own, and when he
is in that condition I can’t grasp it. Now when I speak of a man, he is THE WHOLE THING IN ONE, and easy to
hold and contemplate.

O.M. That is pleasant and convenient, if true. When you speak of “my body” who is the “my”?

Y.M. It is the “me.”

O.M. The body is a property then, and the Me owns it. Who is the Me?

Y.M. The Me is THE WHOLE THING; it is a common property; an undivided ownership, vested in the whole entity.

O.M. If the Me admires a rainbow, is it the whole Me that admires it, including the hair, hands, heels, and all?

Y.M. I think it must consist of just those two parts — the body and the mind.

O.M. You think so? If you say “I believe the world is round,” who is the “I” that is speaking?

Y.M. The mind.

O.M. If you say “I grieve for the loss of my father,” who is the “I”?

Y.M. The mind.

O.M. Is the mind exercising an intellectual function when it examines and accepts the evidence that the world is
round?

Y.M. Yes.

O.M. Is it exercising an intellectual function when it grieves for the loss of your father?

Y.M. That is not cerebration, brain-work, it is a matter of FEELING.

O.M. Then its source is not in your mind, but in your MORAL territory?

Y.M. I have to grant it.

O.M. Is your mind a part of your PHYSICAL equipment?

Y.M. No. It is independent of it; it is spiritual.

O.M. Being spiritual, it cannot be affected by physical influences?

Y.M. No.

O.M. Does the mind remain sober with the body is drunk?

Y.M. Well — no.

O.M. There IS a physical effect present, then?

Y.M. It looks like it.

O.M. A cracked skull has resulted in a crazy mind. Why should it happen if the mind is spiritual, and INDEPENDENT of
physical influences?

Y.M. Well — I don’t know.

O.M. When you have a pain in your foot, how do you know it?

Y.M. I feel it.

O.M. But you do not feel it until a nerve reports the hurt to the brain. Yet the brain is the seat of the mind, is
it not?

Y.M. I think so.

O.M. But isn’t spiritual enough to learn what is happening in the outskirts without the help of the PHYSICAL
messenger? You perceive that the question of who or what the Me is, is not a simple one at all. You say “I admire the
rainbow,” and “I believe the world is round,” and in these cases we find that the Me is not speaking, but only the
MENTAL part. You say, “I grieve,” and again the Me is not all speaking, but only the MORAL part. You say the mind is
wholly spiritual; then you say “I have a pain” and find that this time the Me is mental AND spiritual combined. We all
use the “I” in this indeterminate fashion, there is no help for it. We imagine a Master and King over what you call The
Whole Thing, and we speak of him as “I,” but when we try to define him we find we cannot do it. The intellect and the
feelings can act quite INDEPENDENTLY of each other; we recognize that, and we look around for a Ruler who is master
over both, and can serve as a DEFINITE AND INDISPUTABLE “I,” and enable us to know what we mean and who or what we are
talking about when we use that pronoun, but we have to give it up and confess that we cannot find him. To me, Man is a
machine, made up of many mechanisms, the moral and mental ones acting automatically in accordance with the impulses of
an interior Master who is built out of born-temperament and an accumulation of multitudinous outside influences and
trainings; a machine whose ONE function is to secure the spiritual contentment of the Master, be his desires good or be
they evil; a machine whose Will is absolute and must be obeyed, and always IS obeyed.

Y.M. Maybe the Me is the Soul?

O.M. Maybe it is. What is the Soul?

Y.M. I don’t know.

O.M. Neither does any one else.

The Master Passion

Y.M. What is the Master? — or, in common speech, the Conscience? Explain it.

O.M. It is that mysterious autocrat, lodged in a man, which compels the man to content its desires. It may be called
the Master Passion — the hunger for Self–Approval.

Y.M. Where is its seat?

O.M. In man’s moral constitution.

Y.M. Are its commands for the man’s good?

O.M. It is indifferent to the man’s good; it never concerns itself about anything but the satisfying of its own
desires. It can be TRAINED to prefer things which will be for the man’s good, but it will prefer them only because they
will content IT better than other things would.

Y.M. Then even when it is trained to high ideals it is still looking out for its own contentment, and not for the
man’s good.

O.M. True. Trained or untrained, it cares nothing for the man’s good, and never concerns itself about it.

Y.M. It seems to be an IMMORAL force seated in the man’s moral constitution.

O.M. It is a COLORLESS force seated in the man’s moral constitution. Let us call it an instinct — a blind,
unreasoning instinct, which cannot and does not distinguish between good morals and bad ones, and cares nothing for
results to the man provided its own contentment be secured; and it will ALWAYS secure that.

Y.M. It seeks money, and it probably considers that that is an advantage for the man?

O.M. It is not always seeking money, it is not always seeking power, nor office, nor any other MATERIAL advantage.
In ALL cases it seeks a SPIRITUAL contentment, let the MEANS be what they may. Its desires are determined by the man’s
temperament — and it is lord over that. Temperament, Conscience, Susceptibility, Spiritual Appetite, are, in fact, the
same thing. Have you ever heard of a person who cared nothing for money?

Y.M. Yes. A scholar who would not leave his garret and his books to take a place in a business house at a large
salary.

O.M. He had to satisfy his master — that is to say, his temperament, his Spiritual Appetite — and it preferred books
to money. Are there other cases?

Y.M. Yes, the hermit.

O.M. It is a good instance. The hermit endures solitude, hunger, cold, and manifold perils, to content his autocrat,
who prefers these things, and prayer and contemplation, to money or to any show or luxury that money can buy. Are there
others?

Y.M. Yes. The artist, the poet, the scientist.

O.M. Their autocrat prefers the deep pleasures of these occupations, either well paid or ill paid, to any others in
the market, at any price. You REALIZE that the Master Passion — the contentment of the spirit — concerns itself with
many things besides so-called material advantage, material prosperity, cash, and all that?

Y.M. I think I must concede it.

O.M. I believe you must. There are perhaps as many Temperaments that would refuse the burdens and vexations and
distinctions of public office as there are that hunger after them. The one set of Temperaments seek the contentment of
the spirit, and that alone; and this is exactly the case with the other set. Neither set seeks anything BUT the
contentment of the spirit. If the one is sordid, both are sordid; and equally so, since the end in view is precisely
the same in both cases. And in both cases Temperament decides the preference — and Temperament is BORN, not made.

Conclusion

O.M. You have been taking a holiday?

Y.M. Yes; a mountain tramp covering a week. Are you ready to talk?

O.M. Quite ready. What shall we begin with?

Y.M. Well, lying abed resting up, two days and nights, I have thought over all these talks, and passed them
carefully in review. With this result: that . . . that . . . are you intending to publish your
notions about Man some day?

O.M. Now and then, in these past twenty years, the Master inside of me has half-intended to order me to set them to
paper and publish them. Do I have to tell you why the order has remained unissued, or can you explain so simply a thing
without my help?

Y.M. By your doctrine, it is simplicity itself: outside influences moved your interior Master to give the order;
stronger outside influences deterred him. Without the outside influences, neither of these impulses could ever have
been born, since a person’s brain is incapable or originating an idea within itself.

O.M. Correct. Go on.

Y.M. The matter of publishing or withholding is still in your Master’s hands. If some day an outside influence shall
determine him to publish, he will give the order, and it will be obeyed.

O.M. That is correct. Well?

Y.M. Upon reflection I have arrived at the conviction that the publication of your doctrines would be harmful. Do
you pardon me?

O.M. Pardon YOU? You have done nothing. You are an instrument — a speaking-trumpet. Speaking-trumpets are not
responsible for what is said through them. Outside influences — in the form of lifelong teachings, trainings, notions,
prejudices, and other second-hand importations — have persuaded the Master within you that the publication of these
doctrines would be harmful. Very well, this is quite natural, and was to be expected; in fact, was inevitable. Go on;
for the sake of ease and convenience, stick to habit: speak in the first person, and tell me what your Master thinks
about it.

Y.M. Well, to begin: it is a desolating doctrine; it is not inspiring, enthusing, uplifting. It takes the glory out
of man, it takes the pride out of him, it takes the heroism out of him, it denies him all personal credit, all
applause; it not only degrades him to a machine, but allows him no control over the machine; makes a mere coffee-mill
of him, and neither permits him to supply the coffee nor turn the crank, his sole and piteously humble function being
to grind coarse or fine, according to his make, outside impulses doing the rest.

O.M. It is correctly stated. Tell me — what do men admire most in each other?

O.M. I would not go any further. These are ELEMENTALS. Virtue, fortitude, holiness, truthfulness, loyalty, high
ideals — these, and all the related qualities that are named in the dictionary, are MADE OF THE ELEMENTALS, by
blendings, combinations, and shadings of the elementals, just as one makes green by blending blue and yellow, and makes
several shades and tints of red by modifying the elemental red. There are several elemental colors; they are all in the
rainbow; out of them we manufacture and name fifty shades of them. You have named the elementals of the human rainbow,
and also one BLEND— heroism, which is made out of courage and magnanimity. Very well, then; which of these elements
does the possessor of it manufacture for himself? Is it intellect?

Y.M. No.

O.M. Why?

Y.M. He is born with it.

O.M. Is it courage?

Y.M. No. He is born with it.

O.M. Is it majesty of build, beauty of countenance?

Y.M. No. They are birthrights.

O.M. Take those others — the elemental moral qualities — charity, benevolence, magnanimity, kindliness; fruitful
seeds, out of which spring, through cultivation by outside influences, all the manifold blends and combinations of
virtues named in the dictionaries: does man manufacture any of those seeds, or are they all born in him?

Y.M. Born in him.

O.M. Who manufactures them, then?

Y.M. God.

O.M. Where does the credit of it belong?

Y.M. To God.

O.M. And the glory of which you spoke, and the applause?

Y.M. To God.

O.M. Then it is YOU who degrade man. You make him claim glory, praise, flattery, for every valuable thing he
possesses — BORROWED finery, the whole of it; no rag of it earned by himself, not a detail of it produced by his own
labor. YOU make man a humbug; have I done worse by him?

Y.M. You have made a machine of him.

O.M. Who devised that cunning and beautiful mechanism, a man’s hand?

Y.M. God.

O.M. Who devised the law by which it automatically hammers out of a piano an elaborate piece of music, without
error, while the man is thinking about something else, or talking to a friend?

Y.M. God.

O.M. Who devised the blood? Who devised the wonderful machinery which automatically drives its renewing and
refreshing streams through the body, day and night, without assistance or advice from the man? Who devised the man’s
mind, whose machinery works automatically, interests itself in what it pleases, regardless of its will or desire,
labors all night when it likes, deaf to his appeals for mercy? God devised all these things. I have not made
man a machine, God made him a machine. I am merely calling attention to the fact, nothing more. Is it wrong to call
attention to the fact? Is it a crime?

Y.M. I think it is wrong to EXPOSE a fact when harm can come of it.

O.M. Go on.

Y.M. Look at the matter as it stands now. Man has been taught that he is the supreme marvel of the Creation; he
believes it; in all the ages he has never doubted it, whether he was a naked savage, or clothed in purple and fine
linen, and civilized. This has made his heart buoyant, his life cheery. His pride in himself, his sincere admiration of
himself, his joy in what he supposed were his own and unassisted achievements, and his exultation over the praise and
applause which they evoked — these have exalted him, enthused him, ambitioned him to higher and higher flights; in a
word, made his life worth the living. But by your scheme, all this is abolished; he is degraded to a machine, he is a
nobody, his noble prides wither to mere vanities; let him strive as he may, he can never be any better than his
humblest and stupidest neighbor; he would never be cheerful again, his life would not be worth the living.

O.M. You really think that?

Y.M. I certainly do.

O.M. Have you ever seen me uncheerful, unhappy.

Y.M. No.

O.M. Well, I believe these things. Why have they not made me unhappy?

Y.M. Oh, well — temperament, of course! You never let THAT escape from your scheme.

O.M. That is correct. If a man is born with an unhappy temperament, nothing can make him happy; if he is born with a
happy temperament, nothing can make him unhappy.

Y.M. What — not even a degrading and heart-chilling system of beliefs?

O.M. Beliefs? Mere beliefs? Mere convictions? They are powerless. They strive in vain against inborn
temperament.

Y.M. I can’t believe that, and I don’t.

O.M. Now you are speaking hastily. It shows that you have not studiously examined the facts. Of all your intimates,
which one is the happiest? Isn’t it Burgess?

Y.M. Easily.

O.M. And which one is the unhappiest? Henry Adams?

Y.M. Without a question!

O.M. I know them well. They are extremes, abnormals; their temperaments are as opposite as the poles. Their
life-histories are about alike — but look at the results! Their ages are about the same — about around fifty. Burgess
had always been buoyant, hopeful, happy; Adams has always been cheerless, hopeless, despondent. As young fellows both
tried country journalism — and failed. Burgess didn’t seem to mind it; Adams couldn’t smile, he could only mourn and
groan over what had happened and torture himself with vain regrets for not having done so and so instead of so and so —
THEN he would have succeeded. They tried the law — and failed. Burgess remained happy — because he couldn’t help it.
Adams was wretched — because he couldn’t help it. From that day to this, those two men have gone on trying things and
failing: Burgess has come out happy and cheerful every time; Adams the reverse. And we do absolutely know that these
men’s inborn temperaments have remained unchanged through all the vicissitudes of their material affairs. Let us see
how it is with their immaterials. Both have been zealous Democrats; both have been zealous Republicans; both have been
zealous Mugwumps. Burgess has always found happiness and Adams unhappiness in these several political beliefs and in
their migrations out of them. Both of these men have been Presbyterians, Universalists, Methodists, Catholics — then
Presbyterians again, then Methodists again. Burgess has always found rest in these excursions, and Adams unrest. They
are trying Christian Science, now, with the customary result, the inevitable result. No political or religious belief
can make Burgess unhappy or the other man happy. I assure you it is purely a matter of temperament. Beliefs are
ACQUIREMENTS, temperaments are BORN; beliefs are subject to change, nothing whatever can change temperament.

Y.M. You have instanced extreme temperaments.

O.M. Yes, the half-dozen others are modifications of the extremes. But the law is the same. Where the temperament is
two-thirds happy, or two-thirds unhappy, no political or religious beliefs can change the proportions. The vast
majority of temperaments are pretty equally balanced; the intensities are absent, and this enables a nation to learn to
accommodate itself to its political and religious circumstances and like them, be satisfied with them, at last prefer
them. Nations do not THINK, they only FEEL. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not
their brains. A nation can be brought — by force of circumstances, not argument — to reconcile itself to ANY KIND OF
GOVERNMENT OR RELIGION THAT CAN BE DEVISED; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later, it will
prefer them and will fiercely fight for them. As instances, you have all history: the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians,
the Egyptians, the Russians, the Germans, the French, the English, the Spaniards, the Americans, the South Americans,
the Japanese, the Chinese, the Hindus, the Turks — a thousand wild and tame religions, every kind of government that
can be thought of, from tiger to house-cat, each nation KNOWING it has the only true religion and the only sane system
of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it, each proud of its fancied supremacy,
each perfectly sure it is the pet of God, each without undoubting confidence summoning Him to take command in time of
war, each surprised when He goes over to the enemy, but by habit able to excuse it and resume compliments — in a word,
the whole human race content, always content, persistently content, indestructibly content, happy, thankful, proud, NO
MATTER WHAT ITS RELIGION IS, NOR WHETHER ITS MASTER BE TIGER OR HOUSE-CAT. Am I stating facts? You know I am. Is the
human race cheerful? You know it is. Considering what it can stand, and be happy, you do me too much honor when you
think that I can place before it a system of plain cold facts that can take the cheerfulness out of it.
Nothing can do that. Everything has been tried. Without success. I beg you not to be troubled.

The Death of Jean

The death of Jean Clemens occurred early in the morning of December 24, 1909. Mr. Clemens was in great stress of
mind when I first saw him, but a few hours later I found him writing steadily.

“I am setting it down,” he said, “everything. It is a relief to me to write it. It furnishes me an excuse for
thinking.” At intervals during that day and the next I looked in, and usually found him writing. Then on the evening of
the 26th, when he knew that Jean had been laid to rest in Elmira, he came to my room with the manuscript in his
hand.

“I have finished it,” he said; “read it. I can form no opinion of it myself. If you think it worthy, some day — at
the proper time — it can end my autobiography. It is the final chapter.”

Four months later — almost to the day — (April 21st) he was with Jean.

Albert Bigelow Paine.

Stormfield, Christmas Eve, 11 A.M., 1909.

JEAN IS DEAD!

Has any one ever tried to put upon paper all the little happenings connected with a dear one — happenings of the
twenty-four hours preceding the sudden and unexpected death of that dear one? Would a book contain them? Would two
books contain them? I think not. They pour into the mind in a flood. They are little things that have been always
happening every day, and were always so unimportant and easily forgettable before — but now! Now, how different! how
precious they are, now dear, how unforgettable, how pathetic, how sacred, how clothed with dignity!

Last night Jean, all flushed with splendid health, and I the same, from the wholesome effects of my Bermuda holiday,
strolled hand in hand from the dinner-table and sat down in the library and chatted, and planned, and discussed,
cheerily and happily (and how unsuspectingly!) — until nine — which is late for us — then went upstairs, Jean’s
friendly German dog following. At my door Jean said, “I can’t kiss you good night, father: I have a cold, and you could
catch it.” I bent and kissed her hand. She was moved — I saw it in her eyes — and she impulsively kissed my hand in
return. Then with the usual gay “Sleep well, dear!” from both, we parted.

At half past seven this morning I woke, and heard voices outside my door. I said to myself, “Jean is starting on her
usual horseback flight to the station for the mail.” Then Katy 2 entered, stood
quaking and gasping at my bedside a moment, then found her tongue:

“MISS JEAN IS DEAD!”

Possibly I know now what the soldier feels when a bullet crashes through his heart.

In her bathroom there she lay, the fair young creature, stretched upon the floor and covered with a sheet. And
looking so placid, so natural, and as if asleep. We knew what had happened. She was an epileptic: she had been seized
with a convulsion and heart failure in her bath. The doctor had to come several miles. His efforts, like our previous
ones, failed to bring her back to life.

It is noon, now. How lovable she looks, how sweet and how tranquil! It is a noble face, and full of dignity; and
that was a good heart that lies there so still.

In England, thirteen years ago, my wife and I were stabbed to the heart with a cablegram which said, “Susy was
mercifully released today.” I had to send a like shot to Clara, in Berlin, this morning. With the peremptory addition,
“You must not come home.” Clara and her husband sailed from here on the 11th of this month. How will Clara bear it?
Jean, from her babyhood, was a worshiper of Clara.

Four days ago I came back from a month’s holiday in Bermuda in perfected health; but by some accident the reporters
failed to perceive this. Day before yesterday, letters and telegrams began to arrive from friends and strangers which
indicated that I was supposed to be dangerously ill. Yesterday Jean begged me to explain my case through the Associated
Press. I said it was not important enough; but she was distressed and said I must think of Clara. Clara would see the
report in the German papers, and as she had been nursing her husband day and night for four months 3 and was worn out and feeble, the shock might be disastrous. There was reason in that;
so I sent a humorous paragraph by telephone to the Associated Press denying the “charge” that I was “dying,” and saying
“I would not do such a thing at my time of life.”

Jean was a little troubled, and did not like to see me treat the matter so lightly; but I said it was best to treat
it so, for there was nothing serious about it. This morning I sent the sorrowful facts of this day’s irremediable
disaster to the Associated Press. Will both appear in this evening’s papers? — the one so blithe, the other so
tragic?

I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother — her incomparable mother! — five and a half years ago; Clara has
gone away to live in Europe; and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! Seven months ago Mr. Roger
died — one of the best friends I ever had, and the nearest perfect, as man and gentleman, I have yet met among my race;
within the last six weeks Gilder has passed away, and Laffan — old, old friends of mine. Jean lies yonder, I sit here;
we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night — and it was forever, we never
suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here — writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzlingly
the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery.

Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days ago. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?

I have looked upon her again. I wonder I can bear it. She looks just as her mother looked when she lay dead in that
Florentine villa so long ago. The sweet placidity of death! it is more beautiful than sleep.

I saw her mother buried. I said I would never endure that horror again; that I would never again look into the grave
of any one dear to me. I have kept to that. They will take Jean from this house tomorrow, and bear her to Elmira, New
York, where lie those of us that have been released, but I shall not follow.

Jean was on the dock when the ship came in, only four days ago. She was at the door, beaming a welcome, when I
reached this house the next evening. We played cards, and she tried to teach me a new game called “Mark Twain.” We sat
chatting cheerily in the library last night, and she wouldn’t let me look into the loggia, where she was making
Christmas preparations. She said she would finish them in the morning, and then her little French friend would arrive
from New York — the surprise would follow; the surprise she had been working over for days. While she was out for a
moment I disloyally stole a look. The loggia floor was clothed with rugs and furnished with chairs and sofas; and the
uncompleted surprise was there: in the form of a Christmas tree that was drenched with silver film in a most wonderful
way; and on a table was prodigal profusion of bright things which she was going to hang upon it today. What desecrating
hand will ever banish that eloquent unfinished surprise from that place? Not mine, surely. All these little matters
have happened in the last four days. “Little.” Yes — THEN. But not now. Nothing she said or thought or did is little
now. And all the lavish humor! — what is become of it? It is pathos, now. Pathos, and the thought of it brings
tears.

All these little things happened such a few hours ago — and now she lies yonder. Lies yonder, and cares for nothing
any more. Strange — marvelous — incredible! I have had this experience before; but it would still be incredible if I
had had it a thousand times.

“MISS JEAN IS DEAD!”

That is what Katy said. When I heard the door open behind the bed’s head without a preliminary knock, I supposed it
was Jean coming to kiss me good morning, she being the only person who was used to entering without formalities.

And so —

I have been to Jean’s parlor. Such a turmoil of Christmas presents for servants and friends! They are everywhere;
tables, chairs, sofas, the floor — everything is occupied, and over-occupied. It is many and many a year since I have
seen the like. In that ancient day Mrs. Clemens and I used to slip softly into the nursery at midnight on Christmas Eve
and look the array of presents over. The children were little then. And now here is Jean’s parlor looking just as that
nursery used to look. The presents are not labeled — the hands are forever idle that would have labeled them today.
Jean’s mother always worked herself down with her Christmas preparations. Jean did the same yesterday and the preceding
days, and the fatigue has cost her her life. The fatigue caused the convulsion that attacked her this morning. She had
had no attack for months.

Jean was so full of life and energy that she was constantly is danger of overtaxing her strength. Every morning she
was in the saddle by half past seven, and off to the station for her mail. She examined the letters and I distributed
them: some to her, some to Mr. Paine, the others to the stenographer and myself. She dispatched her share and then
mounted her horse again and went around superintending her farm and her poultry the rest of the day. Sometimes she
played billiards with me after dinner, but she was usually too tired to play, and went early to bed.

Yesterday afternoon I told her about some plans I had been devising while absent in Bermuda, to lighten her burdens.
We would get a housekeeper; also we would put her share of the secretary-work into Mr. Paine’s hands.

No — she wasn’t willing. She had been making plans herself. The matter ended in a compromise, I submitted. I always
did. She wouldn’t audit the bills and let Paine fill out the checks — she would continue to attend to that herself.
Also, she would continue to be housekeeper, and let Katy assist. Also, she would continue to answer the letters of
personal friends for me. Such was the compromise. Both of us called it by that name, though I was not able to see where
my formidable change had been made.

However, Jean was pleased, and that was sufficient for me. She was proud of being my secretary, and I was never able
to persuade her to give up any part of her share in that unlovely work.

In the talk last night I said I found everything going so smoothly that if she were willing I would go back to
Bermuda in February and get blessedly out of the clash and turmoil again for another month. She was urgent that I
should do it, and said that if I would put off the trip until March she would take Katy and go with me. We struck hands
upon that, and said it was settled. I had a mind to write to Bermuda by tomorrow’s ship and secure a furnished house
and servants. I meant to write the letter this morning. But it will never be written, now.

For she lies yonder, and before her is another journey than that.

Night is closing down; the rim of the sun barely shows above the sky-line of the hills.

I have been looking at that face again that was growing dearer and dearer to me every day. I was getting acquainted
with Jean in these last nine months. She had been long an exile from home when she came to us three-quarters of a year
ago. She had been shut up in sanitariums, many miles from us. How eloquent glad and grateful she was to cross her
father’s threshold again!

Would I bring her back to life if I could do it? I would not. If a word would do it, I would beg for strength to
withhold the word. And I would have the strength; I am sure of it. In her loss I am almost bankrupt, and my life is a
bitterness, but I am content: for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts — that gift which makes all
other gifts mean and poor — death. I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached
manhood. I felt in this way when Susy passed away; and later my wife, and later Mr. Rogers. When Clara met me at the
station in New York and told me Mr. Rogers had died suddenly that morning, my thought was, Oh, favorite of fortune —
fortunate all his long and lovely life — fortunate to his latest moment! The reporters said there were tears of sorrow
in my eyes. True — but they were for ME, not for him. He had suffered no loss. All the fortunes he had ever made before
were poverty compared with this one.

Why did I build this house, two years ago? To shelter this vast emptiness? How foolish I was! But I shall stay in
it. The spirits of the dead hallow a house, for me. It was not so with other members of the family. Susy died in the
house we built in Hartford. Mrs. Clemens would never enter it again. But it made the house dearer to me. I have entered
it once since, when it was tenantless and silent and forlorn, but to me it was a holy place and beautiful. It seemed to
me that the spirits of the dead were all about me, and would speak to me and welcome me if they could: Livy, and Susy,
and George, and Henry Robinson, and Charles Dudley Warner. How good and kind they were, and how lovable their lives! In
fancy I could see them all again, I could call the children back and hear them romp again with George — that peerless
black ex-slave and children’s idol who came one day — a flitting stranger — to wash windows, and stayed eighteen years.
Until he died. Clara and Jean would never enter again the New York hotel which their mother had frequented in earlier
days. They could not bear it. But I shall stay in this house. It is dearer to me tonight than ever it was before.
Jean’s spirit will make it beautiful for me always. Her lonely and tragic death — but I will not think of that now.

Jean’s mother always devoted two or three weeks to Christmas shopping, and was always physically exhausted when
Christmas Eve came. Jean was her very own child — she wore herself out present-hunting in New York these latter days.
Paine has just found on her desk a long list of names — fifty, he thinks — people to whom she sent presents last night.
Apparently she forgot no one. And Katy found there a roll of bank-notes, for the servants.

Her dog has been wandering about the grounds today, comradeless and forlorn. I have seen him from the windows. She
got him from Germany. He has tall ears and looks exactly like a wolf. He was educated in Germany, and knows no language
but the German. Jean gave him no orders save in that tongue. And so when the burglar-alarm made a fierce clamor at
midnight a fortnight ago, the butler, who is French and knows no German, tried in vain to interest the dog in the
supposed burglar. Jean wrote me, to Bermuda, about the incident. It was the last letter I was ever to receive from her
bright head and her competent hand. The dog will not be neglected.

There was never a kinder heart than Jean’s. From her childhood up she always spent the most of her allowance on
charities of one kind or another. After she became secretary and had her income doubled she spent her money upon these
things with a free hand. Mine too, I am glad and grateful to say.

She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them all, birds, beasts, and everything — even snakes — an
inheritance from me. She knew all the birds; she was high up in that lore. She became a member of various humane
societies when she was still a little girl — both here and abroad — and she remained an active member to the last. She
founded two or three societies for the protection of animals, here and in Europe.

She was an embarrassing secretary, for she fished my correspondence out of the waste-basket and answered the
letters. She thought all letters deserved the courtesy of an answer. Her mother brought her up in that kindly
error.

She could write a good letter, and was swift with her pen. She had but an indifferent ear music, but her tongue took
to languages with an easy facility. She never allowed her Italian, French, and German to get rusty through neglect.

The telegrams of sympathy are flowing in, from far and wide, now, just as they did in Italy five years and a half
ago, when this child’s mother laid down her blameless life. They cannot heal the hurt, but they take away some of the
pain. When Jean and I kissed hands and parted at my door last, how little did we imagine that in twenty-two hours the
telegraph would be bringing words like these:

“From the bottom of our hearts we send out sympathy, dearest of friends.”

For many and many a day to come, wherever I go in this house, remembrancers of Jean will mutely speak to me of her.
Who can count the number of them?

She was in exile two years with the hope of healing her malady — epilepsy. There are no words to express how
grateful I am that she did not meet her fate in the hands of strangers, but in the loving shelter of her own home.

“MISS JEAN IS DEAD!”

It is true. Jean is dead.

A month ago I was writing bubbling and hilarious articles for magazines yet to appear, and now I am writing —
this.

CHRISTMAS DAY. NOON. — Last night I went to Jean’s room at intervals, and turned back the sheet and looked at the
peaceful face, and kissed the cold brow, and remembered that heartbreaking night in Florence so long ago, in that
cavernous and silent vast villa, when I crept downstairs so many times, and turned back a sheet and looked at a face
just like this one — Jean’s mother’s face — and kissed a brow that was just like this one. And last night I saw again
what I had seen then — that strange and lovely miracle — the sweet, soft contours of early maidenhood restored by the
gracious hand of death! When Jean’s mother lay dead, all trace of care, and trouble, and suffering, and the corroding
years had vanished out of the face, and I was looking again upon it as I had known and worshipped it in its young bloom
and beauty a whole generation before.

About three in the morning, while wandering about the house in the deep silences, as one does in times like these,
when there is a dumb sense that something has been lost that will never be found again, yet must be sought, if only for
the employment the useless seeking gives, I came upon Jean’s dog in the hall downstairs, and noted that he did not
spring to greet me, according to his hospitable habit, but came slow and sorrowfully; also I remembered that he had not
visited Jean’s apartment since the tragedy. Poor fellow, did he know? I think so. Always when Jean was abroad in the
open he was with her; always when she was in the house he was with her, in the night as well as in the day. Her parlor
was his bedroom. Whenever I happened upon him on the ground floor he always followed me about, and when I went upstairs
he went too — in a tumultuous gallop. But now it was different: after patting him a little I went to the library — he
remained behind; when I went upstairs he did not follow me, save with his wistful eyes. He has wonderful eyes — big,
and kind, and eloquent. He can talk with them. He is a beautiful creature, and is of the breed of the New York
police-dogs. I do not like dogs, because they bark when there is no occasion for it; but I have liked this one from the
beginning, because he belonged to Jean, and because he never barks except when there is occasion — which is not oftener
than twice a week.

In my wanderings I visited Jean’s parlor. On a shelf I found a pile of my books, and I knew what it meant. She was
waiting for me to come home from Bermuda and autograph them, then she would send them away. If I only knew whom she
intended them for! But I shall never know. I will keep them. Her hand has touched them — it is an accolade — they are
noble, now.

And in a closet she had hidden a surprise for me — a thing I have often wished I owned: a noble big globe. I
couldn’t see it for the tears. She will never know the pride I take in it, and the pleasure. Today the mails are full
of loving remembrances for her: full of those old, old kind words she loved so well, “Merry Christmas to Jean!” If she
could only have lived one day longer!

At last she ran out of money, and would not use mine. So she sent to one of those New York homes for poor girls all
the clothes she could spare — and more, most likely.

CHRISTMAS NIGHT. — This afternoon they took her away from her room. As soon as I might, I went down to the library,
and there she lay, in her coffin, dressed in exactly the same clothes she wore when she stood at the other end of the
same room on the 6th of October last, as Clara’s chief bridesmaid. Her face was radiant with happy excitement then; it
was the same face now, with the dignity of death and the peace of God upon it.

They told me the first mourner to come was the dog. He came uninvited, and stood up on his hind legs and rested his
fore paws upon the trestle, and took a last long look at the face that was so dear to him, then went his way as
silently as he had come. HE KNOWS.

At mid-afternoon it began to snow. The pity of it — that Jean could not see it! She so loved the snow.

The snow continued to fall. At six o’clock the hearse drew up to the door to bear away its pathetic burden. As they
lifted the casket, Paine began playing on the orchestrelle Schubert’s “Impromptu,” which was Jean’s favorite. Then he
played the Intermezzo; that was for Susy; then he played the Largo; that was for their mother. He did this at my
request. Elsewhere in my Autobiography I have told how the Intermezzo and the Largo came to be associated in my heart
with Susy and Livy in their last hours in this life.

From my windows I saw the hearse and the carriages wind along the road and gradually grow vague and spectral in the
falling snow, and presently disappear. Jean was gone out of my life, and would not come back any more. Jervis, the
cousin she had played with when they were babies together — he and her beloved old Katy — were conducting her to her
distant childhood home, where she will lie by her mother’s side once more, in the company of Susy and Langdon.

DECEMBER 26TH. The dog came to see me at eight o’clock this morning. He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room
will be his quarters hereafter.

The storm raged all night. It has raged all the morning. The snow drives across the landscape in vast clouds,
superb, sublime — and Jean not here to see.

2:30 P.M. — It is the time appointed. The funeral has begun. Four hundred miles away, but I can see it all, just as
if I were there. The scene is the library in the Langdon homestead. Jean’s coffin stands where her mother and I stood,
forty years ago, and were married; and where Susy’s coffin stood thirteen years ago; where her mother’s stood five
years and a half ago; and where mine will stand after a little time.

FIVE O’CLOCK. — It is all over.

When Clara went away two weeks ago to live in Europe, it was hard, but I could bear it, for I had Jean left. I said
WE would be a family. We said we would be close comrades and happy — just we two. That fair dream was in my mind when
Jean met me at the steamer last Monday; it was in my mind when she received me at the door last Tuesday evening. We
were together; WE WERE A FAMILY! the dream had come true — oh, precisely true, contentedly, true, satisfyingly true!
and remained true two whole days.

And now? Now Jean is in her grave!

In the grave — if I can believe it. God rest her sweet spirit!

2 Katy Leary, who had been in the service of the Clemens family
for twenty-nine years.

The Turning-Point of My Life

I

If I understand the idea, the BAZAR invites several of us to write upon the above text. It means the change in my
life’s course which introduced what must be regarded by me as the most IMPORTANT condition of my career. But it also
implies — without intention, perhaps — that that turning-point ITSELF was the creator of the new condition. This gives
it too much distinction, too much prominence, too much credit. It is only the LAST link in a very long chain of
turning-points commissioned to produce the cardinal result; it is not any more important than the humblest of its ten
thousand predecessors. Each of the ten thousand did its appointed share, on its appointed date, in forwarding the
scheme, and they were all necessary; to have left out any one of them would have defeated the scheme and brought about
SOME OTHER result. It know we have a fashion of saying “such and such an event was the turning-point in my life,” but
we shouldn’t say it. We should merely grant that its place as LAST link in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS
link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.

Perhaps the most celebrated turning-point recorded in history was the crossing of the Rubicon. Suetonius says:

Coming up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, he halted for a while, and, revolving in his mind the
importance of the step he was on the point of taking, he turned to those about him and said, “We may still retreat; but
if we pass this little bridge, nothing is left for us but to fight it out in arms.”

This was a stupendously important moment. And all the incidents, big and little, of Caesar’s previous life had been
leading up to it, stage by stage, link by link. This was the LAST link — merely the last one, and no bigger than the
others; but as we gaze back at it through the inflating mists of our imagination, it looks as big as the orbit of
Neptune.

You, the reader, have a PERSONAL interest in that link, and so have I; so has the rest of the human race. It was one
of the links in your life-chain, and it was one of the links in mine. We may wait, now, with bated breath, while Caesar
reflects. Your fate and mine are involved in his decision.

While he was thus hesitating, the following incident occurred. A person remarked for his noble mien and graceful
aspect appeared close at hand, sitting and playing upon a pipe. When not only the shepherds, but a number of soldiers
also, flocked to listen to him, and some trumpeters among them, he snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran to the
river with it, and, sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the other side. Upon this, Caesar exclaimed:
“Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. THE DIE IS CAST.”

So he crossed — and changed the future of the whole human race, for all time. But that stranger was a link in
Caesar’s life-chain, too; and a necessary one. We don’t know his name, we never hear of him again; he was very casual;
he acts like an accident; but he was no accident, he was there by compulsion of HIS life-chain, to blow the
electrifying blast that was to make up Caesar’s mind for him, and thence go piping down the aisles of history
forever.

If the stranger hadn’t been there! But he WAS. And Caesar crossed. With such results! Such vast events — each a link
in the HUMAN RACE’S life-chain; each event producing the next one, and that one the next one, and so on: the
destruction of the republic; the founding of the empire; the breaking up of the empire; the rise of Christianity upon
its ruins; the spread of the religion to other lands — and so on; link by link took its appointed place at its
appointed time, the discovery of America being one of them; our Revolution another; the inflow of English and other
immigrants another; their drift westward (my ancestors among them) another; the settlement of certain of them in
Missouri, which resulted in ME. For I was one of the unavoidable results of the crossing of the Rubicon. If the
stranger, with his trumpet blast, had stayed away (which he COULDN’T, for he was the appointed link) Caesar would not
have crossed. What would have happened, in that case, we can never guess. We only know that the things that did happen
would not have happened. They might have been replaced by equally prodigious things, of course, but their nature and
results are beyond our guessing. But the matter that interests me personally is that I would not be HERE now, but
somewhere else; and probably black — there is no telling. Very well, I am glad he crossed. And very really and
thankfully glad, too, though I never cared anything about it before.

II

To me, the most important feature of my life is its literary feature. I have been professionally literary something
more than forty years. There have been many turning-points in my life, but the one that was the link in the chain
appointed to conduct me to the literary guild is the most CONSPICUOUS link in that chain. BECAUSE it was the last one.
It was not any more important than its predecessors. All the other links have an inconspicuous look, except the
crossing of the Rubicon; but as factors in making me literary they are all of the one size, the crossing of the Rubicon
included.

I know how I came to be literary, and I will tell the steps that lead up to it and brought it about.

The crossing of the Rubicon was not the first one, it was hardly even a recent one; I should have to go back ages
before Caesar’s day to find the first one. To save space I will go back only a couple of generations and start with an
incident of my boyhood. When I was twelve and a half years old, my father died. It was in the spring. The summer came,
and brought with it an epidemic of measles. For a time a child died almost every day. The village was paralyzed with
fright, distress, despair. Children that were not smitten with the disease were imprisoned in their homes to save them
from the infection. In the homes there were no cheerful faces, there was no music, there was no singing but of solemn
hymns, no voice but of prayer, no romping was allowed, no noise, no laughter, the family moved spectrally about on
tiptoe, in a ghostly hush. I was a prisoner. My soul was steeped in this awful dreariness — and in fear. At some time
or other every day and every night a sudden shiver shook me to the marrow, and I said to myself, “There, I’ve got it!
and I shall die.” Life on these miserable terms was not worth living, and at last I made up my mind to get the disease
and have it over, one way or the other. I escaped from the house and went to the house of a neighbor where a playmate
of mine was very ill with the malady. When the chance offered I crept into his room and got into bed with him. I was
discovered by his mother and sent back into captivity. But I had the disease; they could not take that from me. I came
near to dying. The whole village was interested, and anxious, and sent for news of me every day; and not only once a
day, but several times. Everybody believed I would die; but on the fourteenth day a change came for the worse and they
were disappointed.

This was a turning-point of my life. (Link number one.) For when I got well my mother closed my school career and
apprenticed me to a printer. She was tired of trying to keep me out of mischief, and the adventure of the measles
decided her to put me into more masterful hands than hers.

I became a printer, and began to add one link after another to the chain which was to lead me into the literary
profession. A long road, but I could not know that; and as I did not know what its goal was, or even that it had one, I
was indifferent. Also contented.

A young printer wanders around a good deal, seeking and finding work; and seeking again, when necessity commands. N.
B. Necessity is a CIRCUMSTANCE; Circumstance is man’s master — and when Circumstance commands, he must obey; he may
argue the matter — that is his privilege, just as it is the honorable privilege of a falling body to argue with the
attraction of gravitation — but it won’t do any good, he must OBEY. I wandered for ten years, under the guidance and
dictatorship of Circumstance, and finally arrived in a city of Iowa, where I worked several months. Among the books
that interested me in those days was one about the Amazon. The traveler told an alluring tale of his long voyage up the
great river from Para to the sources of the Madeira, through the heart of an enchanted land, a land wastefully rich in
tropical wonders, a romantic land where all the birds and flowers and animals were of the museum varieties, and where
the alligator and the crocodile and the monkey seemed as much at home as if they were in the Zoo. Also, he told an
astonishing tale about COCA, a vegetable product of miraculous powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so
strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch
of powdered coca and require no other sustenance.

I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to open up a trade in coca with all the world.
During months I dreamed that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that splendid enterprise upon
an unsuspecting planet. But all in vain. A person may PLAN as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely
to come of it until the magician CIRCUMSTANCE steps in and takes the matter off his hands. At last Circumstance came to
my help. It was in this way. Circumstance, to help or hurt another man, made him lose a fifty-dollar bill in the
street; and to help or hurt me, made me find it. I advertised the find, and left for the Amazon the same day. This was
another turning-point, another link.

Could Circumstance have ordered another dweller in that town to go to the Amazon and open up a world-trade in coca
on a fifty-dollar basis and been obeyed? No, I was the only one. There were other fools there — shoals and shoals of
them — but they were not of my kind. I was the only one of my kind.

Circumstance is powerful, but it cannot work alone; it has to have a partner. Its partner is man’s TEMPERAMENT— his
natural disposition. His temperament is not his invention, it is BORN in him, and he has no authority over it, neither
is he responsible for its acts. He cannot change it, nothing can change it, nothing can modify it — except temporarily.
But it won’t stay modified. It is permanent, like the color of the man’s eyes and the shape of his ears. Blue eyes are
gray in certain unusual lights; but they resume their natural color when that stress is removed.

A Circumstance that will coerce one man will have no effect upon a man of a different temperament. If Circumstance
had thrown the bank-note in Caesar’s way, his temperament would not have made him start for the Amazon. His temperament
would have compelled him to do something with the money, but not that. It might have made him advertise the note — and
WAIT. We can’t tell. Also, it might have made him go to New York and buy into the Government, with results that would
leave Tweed nothing to learn when it came his turn.

Very well, Circumstance furnished the capital, and my temperament told me what to do with it. Sometimes a
temperament is an ass. When that is the case of the owner of it is an ass, too, and is going to remain one. Training,
experience, association, can temporarily so polish him, improve him, exalt him that people will think he is a mule, but
they will be mistaken. Artificially he IS a mule, for the time being, but at bottom he is an ass yet, and will remain
one.

By temperament I was the kind of person that DOES things. Does them, and reflects afterward. So I started for the
Amazon without reflecting and without asking any questions. That was more than fifty years ago. In all that time my
temperament has not changed, by even a shade. I have been punished many and many a time, and bitterly, for doing things
and reflecting afterward, but these tortures have been of no value to me; I still do the thing commanded by
Circumstance and Temperament, and reflect afterward. Always violently. When I am reflecting, on these occasions, even
deaf persons can hear me think.

I went by the way of Cincinnati, and down the Ohio and Mississippi. My idea was to take ship, at New Orleans, for
Para. In New Orleans I inquired, and found there was no ship leaving for Para. Also, that there never had BEEN one
leaving for Para. I reflected. A policeman came and asked me what I was doing, and I told him. He made me move on, and
said if he caught me reflecting in the public street again he would run me in.

After a few days I was out of money. Then Circumstance arrived, with another turning-point of my life — a new link.
On my way down, I had made the acquaintance of a pilot. I begged him to teach me the river, and he consented. I became
a pilot.

By and by Circumstance came again — introducing the Civil War, this time, in order to push me ahead another stage or
two toward the literary profession. The boats stopped running, my livelihood was gone.

Circumstance came to the rescue with a new turning-point and a fresh link. My brother was appointed secretary to the
new Territory of Nevada, and he invited me to go with him and help him in his office. I accepted.

In Nevada, Circumstance furnished me the silver fever and I went into the mines to make a fortune, as I supposed;
but that was not the idea. The idea was to advance me another step toward literature. For amusement I scribbled things
for the Virginia City ENTERPRISE. One isn’t a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature,
and learning — unconsciously at first, consciously later — to discriminate between the two, within his mental
limitations; and meantime he is unconsciously acquiring what is called a “style.” One of my efforts attracted
attention, and the ENTERPRISE sent for me and put me on its staff.

And so I became a journalist — another link. By and by Circumstance and the Sacramento UNION sent me to the Sandwich
Islands for five or six months, to write up sugar. I did it; and threw in a good deal of extraneous matter that hadn’t
anything to do with sugar. But it was this extraneous matter that helped me to another link.

It made me notorious, and San Francisco invited me to lecture. Which I did. And profitably. I had long had a desire
to travel and see the world, and now Circumstance had most kindly and unexpectedly hurled me upon the platform and
furnished me the means. So I joined the “Quaker City Excursion.”

When I returned to America, Circumstance was waiting on the pier — with the LAST link — the conspicuous, the
consummating, the victorious link: I was asked to WRITE A BOOK, and I did it, and called it THE INNOCENTS ABROAD. Thus
I became at last a member of the literary guild. That was forty-two years ago, and I have been a member ever since.
Leaving the Rubicon incident away back where it belongs, I can say with truth that the reason I am in the literary
profession is because I had the measles when I was twelve years old.

III

Now what interests me, as regards these details, is not the details themselves, but the fact that none of them was
foreseen by me, none of them was planned by me, I was the author of none of them. Circumstance, working in harness with
my temperament, created them all and compelled them all. I often offered help, and with the best intentions, but it was
rejected — as a rule, uncourteously. I could never plan a thing and get it to come out the way I planned it. It came
out some other way — some way I had not counted upon.

And so I do not admire the human being — as an intellectual marvel — as much as I did when I was young, and got him
out of books, and did not know him personally. When I used to read that such and such a general did a certain brilliant
thing, I believed it. Whereas it was not so. Circumstance did it by help of his temperament. The circumstances would
have failed of effect with a general of another temperament: he might see the chance, but lose the advantage by being
by nature too slow or too quick or too doubtful. Once General Grant was asked a question about a matter which had been
much debated by the public and the newspapers; he answered the question without any hesitancy. “General, who planned
the the march through Georgia?” “The enemy!” He added that the enemy usually makes your plans for you. He meant that
the enemy by neglect or through force of circumstances leaves an opening for you, and you see your chance and take
advantage of it.

Circumstances do the planning for us all, no doubt, by help of our temperaments. I see no great difference between a
man and a watch, except that the man is conscious and the watch isn’t, and the man TRIES to plan things and the watch
doesn’t. The watch doesn’t wind itself and doesn’t regulate itself — these things are done exteriorly. Outside
influences, outside circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him. Left to himself, he wouldn’t get regulated at all,
and the sort of time he would keep would not be valuable. Some rare men are wonderful watches, with gold case,
compensation balance, and all those things, and some men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys. I am a
Waterbury. A Waterbury of that kind, some say.

A nation is only an individual multiplied. It makes plans and Circumstances comes and upsets them — or enlarges
them. Some patriots throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a Bastille. The PLANS stop there; then
Circumstance comes in, quite unexpectedly, and turns these modest riots into a revolution.

And there was poor Columbus. He elaborated a deep plan to find a new route to an old country. Circumstance revised
his plan for him, and he found a new WORLD. And HE gets the credit of it to this day. He hadn’t anything to do with
it.

Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours) was the Garden of Eden. It was there that
the first link was forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me into the literary guild.
Adam’s TEMPERAMENT was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only
command Adam would NEVER be able to disobey. It said, “Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable.”
The latter command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his TEMPERAMENT—
which he did not create and had no authority over. For the TEMPERAMENT is the man; the thing tricked out with clothes
and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The law of the tiger’s temperament is, Thou shalt kill; the law of
the sheep’s temperament is Thou shalt not kill. To issue later commands requiring the tiger to let the fat stranger
alone, and requiring the sheep to imbue its hands in the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those commands CAN’T
be obeyed. They would invite to violations of the law of TEMPERAMENT, which is supreme, and take precedence of all
other authorities. I cannot help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That is, in their temperaments. Not in THEM,
poor helpless young creatures — afflicted with temperaments made out of butter; which butter was commanded to get into
contact with fire and BE MELTED. What I cannot help wishing is, that Adam had been postponed, and Martin Luther and
Joan of Arc put in their place — that splendid pair equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos. By
neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan have beguiled THEM to eat the apple. There would have been
results! Indeed, yes. The apple would be intact today; there would be no human race; there would be no YOU; there would
be no ME. And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been
defeated.

How to Make History Dates Stick

These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words large enough to command respect. In the hope that
you are listening, and that you have confidence in me, I will proceed. Dates are difficult things to acquire; and after
they are acquired it is difficult to keep them in the head. But they are very valuable. They are like the cattle-pens
of a ranch — they shut in the several brands of historical cattle, each within its own fence, and keep them from
getting mixed together. Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking
in appearance, and they don’t take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures
are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick. They can make nearly anything stick — particularly IF YOU MAKE THE
PICTURES YOURSELF. Indeed, that is the great point — make the pictures YOURSELF. I know about this from experience.
Thirty years ago I was delivering a memorized lecture every night, and every night I had to help myself with a page of
notes to keep from getting myself mixed. The notes consisted of beginnings of sentences, and were eleven in number, and
they ran something like this:

“IN THAT REGION THE WEATHER— ”

“AT THAT TIME IT WAS A CUSTOM— ”

“BUT IN CALIFORNIA ONE NEVER HEARD— ”

Eleven of them. They initialed the brief divisions of the lecture and protected me against skipping. But they all
looked about alike on the page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never with certainty remember
the order of their succession; therefore I always had to keep those notes by me and look at them every little while.
Once I mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the terrors of that evening. I now saw that I must invent some
other protection. So I got ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order — I, A, B, and so on — and I went
on the platform the next night with these marked in ink on my ten finger-nails. But it didn’t answer. I kept track of
the figures for a while; then I lost it, and after that I was never quite sure which finger I had used last. I couldn’t
lick off a letter after using it, for while that would have made success certain it also would have provoked too much
curiosity. There was curiosity enough without that. To the audience I seemed more interested in my fingernails than I
was in my subject; one or two persons asked me afterward what was the matter with my hands.

It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles passed away. In two minutes I made six
pictures with a pen, and they did the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly. I threw the pictures
away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I could shut my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a
century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years ago, but I would rewrite it from the pictures —
for they remain. Here are three of them: (Fig. 1).

The first one is a haystack — below it a rattlesnake — and it told me where to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson
Valley. The second one told me where to begin the talk about a strange and violent wind that used to burst upon Carson
City from the Sierra Nevadas every afternoon at two o’clock and try to blow the town away. The third picture, as you
easily perceive, is lightning; its duty was to remind me when it was time to begin to talk about San Francisco weather,
where there IS no lightning — nor thunder, either — and it never failed me.

I will give you a valuable hint. When a man is making a speech and you are to follow him don’t jot down notes to
speak from, jot down PICTURES. It is awkward and embarrassing to have to keep referring to notes; and besides it breaks
up your speech and makes it ragged and non-coherent; but you can tear up your pictures as soon as you have made them —
they will stay fresh and strong in your memory in the order and sequence in which you scratched them down. And many
will admire to see what a good memory you are furnished with, when perhaps your memory is not any better than mine.

Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess was trying to hammer some primer histories
into their heads. Part of this fun — if you like to call it that — consisted in the memorizing of the accession dates
of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter,
hard contract. It was all dates, and all looked alike, and they wouldn’t stick. Day after day of the summer vacation
dribbled by, and still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of them.

With my lecture experience in mind I was aware that I could invent some way out of the trouble with pictures, but I
hoped a way could be found which would let them romp in the open air while they learned the kings. I found it, and they
mastered all the monarchs in a day or two.

The idea was to make them SEE the reigns with their eyes; that would be a large help. We were at the farm then. From
the house-porch the grounds sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right to the high ground where my
small work-den stood. A carriage-road wound through the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the English
monarchs, beginning with the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and clearly see every reign and its length,
from the Conquest down to Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign — EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN YEARS OF
English history under your eye at once!

English history was an unusually live topic in America just then. The world had suddenly realized that while it was
not noticing the Queen had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and Elizabeth, and gaining in length every day. Her
reign had entered the list of the long ones; everybody was interested now — it was watching a race. Would she pass the
long Edward? There was a possibility of it. Would she pass the long Henry? Doubtful, most people said. The long George?
Impossible! Everybody said it. But we have lived to see her leave him two years behind.

I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and at the beginning and end of each reign I
drove a three-foot white-pine stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it. Abreast the middle
of the porch-front stood a great granite flower-vase overflowing with a cataract of bright-yellow flowers — I can’t
think of their name. The vase of William the Conqueror. We put his name on it and his accession date, 1066. We started
from that and measured off twenty-one feet of the road, and drove William Rufus’s state; then thirteen feet and drove
the first Henry’s stake; then thirty-five feet and drove Stephen’s; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past the
summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five, ten, and seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John;
turned the curve and entered upon just what was needed for Henry III. — a level, straight stretch of fifty-six feet of
road without a crinkle in it. And it lay exactly in front of the house, in the middle of the grounds. There couldn’t
have been a better place for that long reign; you could stand on the porch and see those two wide-apart stakes almost
with your eyes shut. (Fig. 2.)

That isn’t the shape of the road — I have bunched it up like that to save room. The road had some great curves in
it, but their gradual sweep was such that they were no mar to history. No, in our road one could tell at a glance who
was who by the size of the vacancy between stakes — with LOCALITY to help, of course.

Although I am away off here in a Swedish village 4 and those stakes did not
stand till the snow came, I can see them today as plainly as ever; and whenever I think of an English monarch his
stakes rise before me of their own accord and I notice the large or small space which he takes up on our road. Are your
kings spaced off in your mind? When you think of Richard III. and of James II. do the durations of their reigns seem
about alike to you? It isn’t so to me; I always notice that there’s a foot’s difference. When you think of Henry III.
do you see a great long stretch of straight road? I do; and just at the end where it joins on to Edward I. I always see
a small pear-bush with its green fruit hanging down. When I think of the Commonwealth I see a shady little group of
these small saplings which we called the oak parlor; when I think of George III. I see him stretching up the hill, part
of him occupied by a flight of stone steps; and I can locate Stephen to an inch when he comes into my mind, for he just
filled the stretch which went by the summer-house. Victoria’s reign reached almost to my study door on the first little
summit; there’s sixteen feet to be added now; I believe that that would carry it to a big pine-tree that was shattered
by some lightning one summer when it was trying to hit me.

We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exercise, too. We trotted the course from the conqueror to
the study, the children calling out the names, dates, and length of reigns as we passed the stakes, going a good gait
along the long reigns, but slowing down when we came upon people like Mary and Edward VI., and the short Stuart and
Plantagenet, to give time to get in the statistics. I offered prizes, too — apples. I threw one as far as I could send
it, and the child that first shouted the reign it fell in got the apple.

The children were encouraged to stop locating things as being “over by the arbor,” or “in the oak parlor,” or “up at
the stone steps,” and say instead that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or in George III. They got
the habit without trouble. To have the long road mapped out with such exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the
habit of leaving books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not previously been able to definitely name
the place, and so had often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and failure; but now I could name the
reign I left them in, and send the children.

Next I thought I would measure off the French reigns, and peg them alongside the English ones, so that we could
always have contemporaneous French history under our eyes as we went our English rounds. We pegged them down to the
Hundred Years’ War, then threw the idea aside, I do not now remember why. After that we made the English pegs fence in
European and American history as well as English, and that answered very well. English and alien poets, statesmen,
artists, heroes, battles, plagues, cataclysms, revolutions — we shoveled them all into the English fences according to
their dates. Do you understand? We gave Washington’s birth to George II.‘s pegs and his death to George III.‘s; George
II. got the Lisbon earthquake and George III. the Declaration of Independence. Goethe, Shakespeare, Napoleon,
Savonarola, Joan of Arc, the French Revolution, the Edict of Nantes, Clive, Wellington, Waterloo, Plassey, Patay,
Cowpens, Saratoga, the Battle of the Boyne, the invention of the logarithms, the microscope, the steam-engine, the
telegraph — anything and everything all over the world — we dumped it all in among the English pegs according to it
date and regardless of its nationality.

If the road-pegging scheme had not succeeded I should have lodged the kings in the children’s heads by means of
pictures — that is, I should have tried. It might have failed, for the pictures could only be effective WHEN MADE BY
THE PUPIL; not the master, for it is the work put upon the drawing that makes the drawing stay in the memory, and my
children were too little to make drawings at that time. And, besides, they had no talent for art, which is strange, for
in other ways they are like me.

But I will develop the picture plan now, hoping that you will be able to use it. It will come good for indoors when
the weather is bad and one cannot go outside and peg a road. Let us imagine that the kings are a procession, and that
they have come out of the Ark and down Ararat for exercise and are now starting back again up the zigzag road. This
will bring several of them into view at once, and each zigzag will represent the length of a king’s reign.

And so on. You will have plenty of space, for by my project you will use the parlor wall. You do not mark on the
wall; that would cause trouble. You only attach bits of paper to it with pins or thumb-tacks. These will leave no
mark.

Take your pen now, and twenty-one pieces of white paper, each two inches square, and we will do the twenty-one years
of the Conqueror’s reign. On each square draw a picture of a whale and write the dates and term of service. We choose
the whale for several reasons: its name and William’s begin with the same letter; it is the biggest fish that swims,
and William is the most conspicuous figure in English history in the way of a landmark; finally, a whale is about the
easiest thing to draw. By the time you have drawn twenty-one wales and written “William I. — 1066–1087 — twenty-one
years” twenty-one times, those details will be your property; you cannot dislodge them from your memory with anything
but dynamite. I will make a sample for you to copy: (Fig. 3).

I have got his chin up too high, but that is no matter; he is looking for Harold. It may be that a whale hasn’t that
fin up there on his back, but I do not remember; and so, since there is a doubt, it is best to err on the safe side. He
looks better, anyway, than he would without it.

Be very careful and ATTENTIVE while you are drawing your first whale from my sample and writing the word and figures
under it, so that you will not need to copy the sample any more. Compare your copy with the sample; examine closely; if
you find you have got everything right and can shut your eyes and see the picture and call the words and figures, then
turn the sample and copy upside down and make the next copy from memory; and also the next and next, and so on, always
drawing and writing from memory until you have finished the whole twenty-one. This will take you twenty minutes, or
thirty, and by that time you will find that you can make a whale in less time than an unpracticed person can make a
sardine; also, up to the time you die you will always be able to furnish William’s dates to any ignorant person that
inquires after them.

You will now take thirteen pieces of BLUE paper, each two inches square, and do William II. (Fig. 4.)

Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also make him small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him
that sick look in the eye. Otherwise you might seem to be continuing the other William, and that would be confusing and
a damage. It is quite right to make him small; he was only about a No. 11 whale, or along there somewhere; there wasn’t
room in him for his father’s great spirit. The barb of that harpoon ought not to show like that, because it is down
inside the whale and ought to be out of sight, but it cannot be helped; if the barb were removed people would think
some one had stuck a whip-stock into the whale. It is best to leave the barb the way it is, then every one will know it
is a harpoon and attending to business. Remember — draw from the copy only once; make your other twelve and the
inscription from memory.

Now the truth is that whenever you have copied a picture and its inscription once from my sample and two or three
times from memory the details will stay with you and be hard to forget. After that, if you like, you may make merely
the whale’s HEAD and WATER-SPOUT for the Conqueror till you end his reign, each time SAYING the inscription in place of
writing it; and in the case of William II. make the HARPOON alone, and say over the inscription each time you do it.
You see, it will take nearly twice as long to do the first set as it will to do the second, and that will give you a
marked sense of the difference in length of the two reigns.

Next do Henry I. on thirty-five squares of RED paper. (Fig. 5.)

That is a hen, and suggests Henry by furnishing the first syllable. When you have repeated the hen and the
inscription until you are perfectly sure of them, draw merely the hen’s head the rest of the thirty-five times, saying
over the inscription each time. Thus: (Fig. 6).

You begin to understand how how this procession is going to look when it is on the wall. First there will be the
Conqueror’s twenty-one whales and water-spouts, the twenty-one white squares joined to one another and making a white
stripe three and one-half feet long; the thirteen blue squares of William II. will be joined to that — a blue stripe
two feet, two inches long, followed by Henry’s red stripe five feet, ten inches long, and so on. The colored divisions
will smartly show to the eye the difference in the length of the reigns and impress the proportions on the memory and
the understanding. (Fig. 7.)

That is a steer. The sound suggests the beginning of Stephen’s name. I choose it for that reason. I can make a
better steer than that when I am not excited. But this one will do. It is a good-enough steer for history. The tail is
defective, but it only wants straightening out.

Next comes Henry II. Give him thirty-five squares of RED paper. These hens must face west, like the former ones.
(Fig. 9.)

This hen differs from the other one. He is on his way to inquire what has been happening in Canterbury.

How we arrive at Richard I., called Richard of the Lion-heart because he was a brave fighter and was never so
contented as when he was leading crusades in Palestine and neglecting his affairs at home. Give him ten squares of
WHITE paper. (Fig. 10).

That is a lion. His office is to remind you of the lion-hearted Richard. There is something the matter with his
legs, but I do not quite know what it is, they do not seem right. I think the hind ones are the most unsatisfactory;
the front ones are well enough, though it would be better if they were rights and lefts.

Next comes King John, and he was a poor circumstance. He was called Lackland. He gave his realm to the Pope. Let him
have seventeen squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 11.)

That creature is a jamboree. It looks like a trademark, but that is only an accident and not intentional. It is
prehistoric and extinct. It used to roam the earth in the Old Silurian times, and lay eggs and catch fish and climb
trees and live on fossils; for it was of a mixed breed, which was the fashion then. It was very fierce, and the Old
Silurians were afraid of it, but this is a tame one. Physically it has no representative now, but its mind has been
transmitted. First I drew it sitting down, but have turned it the other way now because I think it looks more
attractive and spirited when one end of it is galloping. I love to think that in this attitude it gives us a pleasant
idea of John coming all in a happy excitement to see what the barons have been arranging for him at Runnymede, while
the other one gives us an idea of him sitting down to wring his hands and grieve over it.

We now come to Henry III.; RED squares again, of course — fifty-six of them. We must make all the Henrys the same
color; it will make their long reigns show up handsomely on the wall. Among all the eight Henrys there were but two
short ones. A lucky name, as far as longevity goes. The reigns of six of the Henrys cover 227 years. It might have been
well to name all the royal princes Henry, but this was overlooked until it was too late. (Fig. 12.)

This is the best one yet. He is on his way (1265) to have a look at the first House of Commons in English history.
It was a monumental event, the situation in the House, and was the second great liberty landmark which the century had
set up. I have made Henry looking glad, but this was not intentional.

That is an editor. He is trying to think of a word. He props his feet on a chair, which is the editor’s way; then he
can think better. I do not care much for this one; his ears are not alike; still, editor suggests the sound of Edward,
and he will do. I could make him better if I had a model, but I made this one from memory. But is no particular matter;
they all look alike, anyway. They are conceited and troublesome, and don’t pay enough. Edward was the first really
English king that had yet occupied the throne. The editor in the picture probably looks just as Edward looked when it
was first borne in upon him that this was so. His whole attitude expressed gratification and pride mixed with
stupefaction and astonishment.

Edward II. now; twenty BLUE squares. (Fig. 14.)

Another editor. That thing behind his ear is his pencil. Whenever he finds a bright thing in your manuscript he
strikes it out with that. That does him good, and makes him smile and show his teeth, the way he is doing in the
picture. This one has just been striking out a smart thing, and now he is sitting there with his thumbs in his
vest-holes, gloating. They are full of envy and malice, editors are. This picture will serve to remind you that Edward
II. was the first English king who was DEPOSED. Upon demand, he signed his deposition himself. He had found kingship a
most aggravating and disagreeable occupation, and you can see by the look of him that he is glad he resigned. He has
put his blue pencil up for good now. He had struck out many a good thing with it in his time.

Edward III. next; fifty RED squares. (Fig. 15.)

This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he
is going to have for breakfast. This one’s arms are put on wrong. I did not notice it at first, but I see it now.
Somehow he has got his right arm on his left shoulder, and his left arm on his right shoulder, and this shows us the
back of his hands in both instances. It makes him left-handed all around, which is a thing which has never happened
before, except perhaps in a museum. That is the way with art, when it is not acquired but born to you: you start in to
make some simple little thing, not suspecting that your genius is beginning to work and swell and strain in secret, and
all of a sudden there is a convulsion and you fetch out something astonishing. This is called inspiration. It is an
accident; you never know when it is coming. I might have tried as much as a year to think of such a strange thing as an
all-around left-handed man and I could not have done it, for the more you try to think of an unthinkable thing the more
it eludes you; but it can’t elude inspiration; you have only to bait with inspiration and you will get it every time.
Look at Botticelli’s “Spring.” Those snaky women were unthinkable, but inspiration secured them for us, thanks to
goodness. It is too late to reorganize this editor-critic now; we will leave him as he is. He will serve to remind
us.

Richard II. next; twenty-two WHITE squares. (Fig. 16.)

We use the lion again because this is another Richard. Like Edward II., he was DEPOSED. He is taking a last sad look
at his crown before they take it away. There was not room enough and I have made it too small; but it never fitted him,
anyway.

Now we turn the corner of the century with a new line of monarchs — the Lancastrian kings.

Henry IV.; fourteen squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 17.)

This hen has laid the egg of a new dynasty and realizes the magnitude of the event. She is giving notice in the
usual way. You notice I am improving in the construction of hens. At first I made them too much like other animals, but
this one is orthodox. I mention this to encourage you. You will find that the more you practice the more accurate you
will become. I could always draw animals, but before I was educated I could not tell what kind they were when I got
them done, but now I can. Keep up your courage; it will be the same with you, although you may not think it. This Henry
died the year after Joan of Arc was born.

Henry V.; nine BLUE squares. (Fig. 18)

There you see him lost in meditation over the monument which records the amazing figures of the battle of Agincourt.
French history says 20,000 Englishmen routed 80,000 Frenchmen there; and English historians say that the French loss,
in killed and wounded, was 60,000.

Henry VI.; thirty-nine RED squares. (Fig. 19)

This is poor Henry VI., who reigned long and scored many misfortunes and humiliations. Also two great disasters: he
lost France to Joan of Arc and he lost the throne and ended the dynasty which Henry IV. had started in business with
such good prospects. In the picture we see him sad and weary and downcast, with the scepter falling from his nerveless
grasp. It is a pathetic quenching of a sun which had risen in such splendor.

Edward IV.; twenty-two LIGHT-BROWN squares. (Fig. 20.)

That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the
clothes the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and get
bribes for it and become wealthy. That flower which he is wearing in his buttonhole is a rose — a white rose, a York
rose — and will serve to remind us of the War of the Roses, and that the white one was the winning color when Edward
got the throne and dispossessed the Lancastrian dynasty.

Edward V.; one-third of a BLACK square. (Fig. 21.)

His uncle Richard had him murdered in the tower. When you get the reigns displayed upon the wall this one will be
conspicuous and easily remembered. It is the shortest one in English history except Lady Jane Grey’s, which was only
nine days. She is never officially recognized as a monarch of England, but if you or I should ever occupy a throne we
should like to have proper notice taken of it; and it would be only fair and right, too, particularly if we gained
nothing by it and lost our lives besides.

Richard III.; two WHITE squares. (Fig. 22.)

That is not a very good lion, but Richard was not a very good king. You would think that this lion has two heads,
but that is not so; one is only a shadow. There would be shadows for the rest of him, but there was not light enough to
go round, it being a dull day, with only fleeting sun-glimpses now and then. Richard had a humped back and a hard
heart, and fell at the battle of Bosworth. I do not know the name of that flower in the pot, but we will use it as
Richard’s trade-mark, for it is said that it grows in only one place in the world — Bosworth Field — and tradition says
it never grew there until Richard’s royal blood warmed its hidden seed to life and made it grow.

Henry VII.; twenty-four BLUE squares. (Fig. 23.)

Henry VII. had no liking for wars and turbulence; he preferred peace and quiet and the general prosperity which such
conditions create. He liked to sit on that kind of eggs on his own private account as well as the nation’s, and hatch
them out and count up their result. When he died he left his heir 2,000,000 pounds, which was a most unusual fortune
for a king to possess in those days. Columbus’s great achievement gave him the discovery-fever, and he sent Sebastian
Cabot to the New World to search out some foreign territory for England. That is Cabot’s ship up there in the corner.
This was the first time that England went far abroad to enlarge her estate — but not the last.

Henry VIII.; thirty-eight RED squares. (Fig. 24.)

That is Henry VIII. suppressing a monastery in his arrogant fashion.

Edward VI.; six squares of YELLOW paper. (Fig. 25.)

He is the last Edward to date. It is indicated by that thing over his head, which is a LAST— shoemaker’s last.

Mary; five squares of BLACK paper. (Fig. 26.)

The picture represents a burning martyr. He is in back of the smoke. The first three letters of Mary’s name and the
first three of the word martyr are the same. Martyrdom was going out in her day and martyrs were becoming scarcer, but
she made several. For this reason she is sometimes called Bloody Mary.

This brings us to the reign of Elizabeth, after passing through a period of nearly five hundred years of England’s
history — 492 to be exact. I think you may now be trusted to go the rest of the way without further lessons in art or
inspirations in the matter of ideas. You have the scheme now, and something in the ruler’s name or career will suggest
the pictorial symbol. The effort of inventing such things will not only help your memory, but will develop originality
in art. See what it has done for me. If you do not find the parlor wall big enough for all of England’s history,
continue it into the dining-room and into other rooms. This will make the walls interesting and instructive and really
worth something instead of being just flat things to hold the house together.

The Memorable Assassination

Note. — The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva, September 10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain’s
Austrian residence. The news came to him at Kaltenleutgeben, a summer resort a little way out of Vienna. To his friend,
the Rev. Jos. H. Twichell, he wrote:

“That good and unoffending lady, the Empress, is killed by a madman, and I am living in the midst of world-history
again. The Queen’s Jubilee last year, the invasion of the Reichsrath by the police, and now this murder, which will
still be talked of and described and painted a thousand a thousand years from now. To have a personal friend of the
wearer of two crowns burst in at the gate in the deep dusk of the evening and say, in a voice broken with tears, ‘My
God! the Empress is murdered,’ and fly toward her home before we can utter a question — why, it brings the giant event
home to you, makes you a part of it and personally interested; it is as if your neighbor, Antony, should come flying
and say, ‘Caesar is butchered — the head of the world is fallen!’

“Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The
Austrian Empire is being draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday, when the funeral
cortege marches.”

He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning it. He prepared the article which follows, but
did not offer it for publication, perhaps feeling that his own close association with the court circles at the moment
prohibited this personal utterance. There appears no such reason for withholding its publication now.

A. B. P.

The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and tremendous the event becomes. The destruction of a
city is a large event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand years; the destruction of a third
part of a nation by plague and famine is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the murder of a
king is a large event, but it has been frequent.

The murder of an empress is the largest of all events. One must go back about two thousand years to find an instance
to put with this one. The oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in Rome and traces its line back
seventeen hundred years, but no member of it has been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until now.
Many a time during these seventeen centuries members of that family have been startled with the news of extraordinary
events — the destruction of cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the wreck of dynasties, the extinction of
religions, the birth of new systems of government; and their descendants have been by to hear of it and talk about it
when all these things were repeated once, twice, or a dozen times — but to even that family has come news at last which
is not staled by use, has no duplicates in the long reach of its memory.

It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon every individual now living in the world: he has stood alive
and breathing in the presence of an event such as has not fallen within the experience of any traceable or untraceable
ancestor of his for twenty centuries, and it is not likely to fall within the experience of any descendant of his for
twenty more.

Time has made some great changes since the Roman days. The murder of an empress then — even the assassination of
Caesar himself — could not electrify the world as this murder has electrified it. For one reason, there was then not
much of a world to electrify; it was a small world, as to known bulk, and it had rather a thin population, besides; and
for another reason, the news traveled so slowly that its tremendous initial thrill wasted away, week by week and month
by month, on the journey, and by the time it reached the remoter regions there was but little of it left. It was no
longer a fresh event, it was a thing of the far past; it was not properly news, it was history. But the world is
enormous now, and prodigiously populated — that is one change; and another is the lightning swiftness of the flight of
tidings, good and bad. “The Empress is murdered!” When those amazing words struck upon my ear in this Austrian village
last Saturday, three hours after the disaster, I knew that it was already old news in London, Paris, Berlin, New York,
San Francisco, Japan, China, Melbourne, Cape Town, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, and that the entire globe with a single
voice, was cursing the perpetrator of it. Since the telegraph first began to stretch itself wider and wider about the
earth, larger and increasingly larger areas of the world have, as time went on, received simultaneously the shock of a
great calamity; but this is the first time in history that the entire surface of the globe has been swept in a single
instant with the thrill of so gigantic an event.

And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the
answer. He is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and value go: a soiled and patched
young loafer, without gifts, without talents, without education, without morals, without character, without any born
charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any
tramp or prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient
lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human polecat. And it
was within the privileges and powers of this sarcasm upon the human race to reach up — up — up — and strike from its
far summit in the social skies the world’s accepted ideal of Glory and Might and Splendor and Sacredness! It realizes
to us what sorry shows and shadows we are. Without our clothes and our pedestals we are poor things and much of a size;
our dignities are not real, our pomps are shams. At our best and stateliest we are not suns, as we pretended, and
teach, and believe, but only candles; and any bummer can blow us out.

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often forget — or try to: that no man has a wholly
undiseased mind; that in one way or another all men are mad. Many are mad for money. When this madness is in a mild
form it is harmless and the man passes for sane; but when it develops powerfully and takes possession of the man, it
can make him cheat, rob, and kill; and when he has got his fortune and lost it again it can land him in the asylum or
the suicide’s coffin. Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast; it can grow to a frenzy of despair and make an
otherwise sane and highly gifted prince, like Rudolph, throw away the crown of an empire and snuff out his own life.
All the whole list of desires, predilections, aversions, ambitions, passions, cares, griefs, regrets, remorses, are
incipient madness, and ready to grow, spread, and consume, when the occasion comes. There are no healthy minds, and
nothing saves any man but accident — the accident of not having his malady put to the supreme test.

One of the commonest forms of madness is the desire to be noticed, the pleasure derived from being noticed. Perhaps
it is not merely common, but universal. In its mildest form it doubtless is universal. Every child is pleased at being
noticed; many intolerable children put in their whole time in distressing and idiotic effort to attract the attention
of visitors; boys are always “showing off”; apparently all men and women are glad and grateful when they find that they
have done a thing which has lifted them for a moment out of obscurity and caused wondering talk. This common madness
can develop, by nurture, into a hunger for notoriety in one, for fame in another. It is this madness for being noticed
and talked about which has invented kingship and the thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with pretty and
showy fineries; it has made kings pick one another’s pockets, scramble for one another’s crowns and estates, slaughter
one another’s subjects; it has raised up prize-fighters, and poets, and villages mayors, and little and big
politicians, and big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions, and banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes,
and Napoleons. Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the township, or the city, or the State, or
the nation, or the planet shouting, “Look — there he goes — that is the man!” And in five minutes’ time, at no cost of
brain, or labor, or genius this mangy Italian tramp has beaten them all, transcended them all, outstripped them all,
for in time their names will perish; but by the friendly help of the insane newspapers and courts and kings and
historians, his is safe and live and thunder in the world all down the ages as long as human speech shall endure! Oh,
if it were not so tragic how ludicrous it would be!

She was so blameless, the Empress; and so beautiful, in mind and heart, in person and spirit; and whether with a
crown upon her head or without it and nameless, a grace to the human race, and almost a justification of its creation;
WOULD be, indeed, but that the animal that struck her down re-establishes the doubt.

In her character was every quality that in woman invites and engages respect, esteem, affection, and homage. Her
tastes, her instincts, and her aspirations were all high and fine and all her life her heart and brain were busy with
activities of a noble sort. She had had bitter griefs, but they did not sour her spirit, and she had had the highest
honors in the world’s gift, but she went her simple way unspoiled. She knew all ranks, and won them all, and made them
her friends. An English fisherman’s wife said, “When a body was in trouble she didn’t send her help, she brought it
herself.” Crowns have adorned others, but she adorned her crowns.

It was a swift celebrity the assassin achieved. And it is marked by some curious contrasts. At noon last, Saturday
there was no one in the world who would have considered acquaintanceship with him a thing worth claiming or mentioning;
no one would have been vain of such an acquaintanceship; the humblest honest boot-black would not have valued the fact
that he had met him or seen him at some time or other; he was sunk in abysmal obscurity, he was away beneath the notice
of the bottom grades of officialdom. Three hours later he was the one subject of conversation in the world, the gilded
generals and admirals and governors were discussing him, all the kings and queens and emperors had put aside their
other interests to talk about him. And wherever there was a man, at the summit of the world or the bottom of it, who by
chance had at some time or other come across that creature, he remembered it with a secret satisfaction, and MENTIONED
it — for it was a distinction, now! It brings human dignity pretty low, and for a moment the thing is not quite
realizable — but it is perfectly true. If there is a king who can remember, now, that he once saw that creature in a
time past, he has let that fact out, in a more or less studiedly casual and indifferent way, some dozens of times
during the past week. For a king is merely human; the inside of him is exactly like the inside of any other person; and
it is human to find satisfaction in being in a kind of personal way connected with amazing events. We are all privately
vain of such a thing; we are all alike; a king is a king by accident; the reason the rest of us are not kings is merely
due to another accident; we are all made out of the same clay, and it is a sufficient poor quality.

Below the kings, these remarks are in the air these days; I know it well as if I were hearing them:

THE COMMANDER: “He was in my army.”

THE GENERAL: “He was in my corps.”

THE COLONEL: “He was in my regiment. A brute. I remember him well.”

THE CAPTAIN: “He was in my company. A troublesome scoundrel. I remember him well.”

THE SERGEANT: “Did I know him? As well as I know you. Why, every morning I used to — ” etc., etc.; a glad, long
story, told to devouring ears.

THE LANDLADY: “Many’s the time he boarded with me. I can show you his very room, and the very bed he slept in. And
the charcoal mark there on the wall — he made that. My little Johnny saw him do it with his own eyes. Didn’t you,
Johnny?”

It is easy to see, by the papers, that the magistrate and the constables and the jailer treasure up the assassin’s
daily remarks and doings as precious things, and as wallowing this week in seas of blissful distinction. The
interviewer, too; he tried to let on that he is not vain of his privilege of contact with this man whom few others are
allowed to gaze upon, but he is human, like the rest, and can no more keep his vanity corked in than could you or
I.

Some think that this murder is a frenzied revolt against the criminal militarism which is impoverishing Europe and
driving the starving poor mad. That has many crimes to answer for, but not this one, I think. One may not attribute to
this man a generous indignation against the wrongs done the poor; one may not dignify him with a generous impulse of
any kind. When he saw his photograph and said, “I shall be celebrated,” he laid bare the impulse that prompted him. It
was a mere hunger for notoriety. There is another confessed case of the kind which is as old as history — the burning
of the temple of Ephesus.

Among the inadequate attempts to account for the assassination we must concede high rank to the many which have
described it as a “peculiarly brutal crime” and then added that it was “ordained from above.” I think this verdict will
not be popular “above.” If the deed was ordained from above, there is no rational way of making this prisoner even
partially responsible for it, and the Genevan court cannot condemn him without manifestly committing a crime. Logic is
logic, and by disregarding its laws even the most pious and showy theologian may be beguiled into preferring charges
which should not be ventured upon except in the shelter of plenty of lightning-rods.

I witnessed the funeral procession, in company with friends, from the windows of the Krantz, Vienna’s sumptuous new
hotel. We came into town in the middle of the forenoon, and I went on foot from the station. Black flags hung down from
all the houses; the aspects were Sunday-like; the crowds on the sidewalks were quiet and moved slowly; very few people
were smoking; many ladies wore deep mourning, gentlemen were in black as a rule; carriages were speeding in all
directions, with footmen and coachmen in black clothes and wearing black cocked hats; the shops were closed; in many
windows were pictures of the Empress: as a beautiful young bride of seventeen; as a serene and majestic lady with added
years; and finally in deep black and without ornaments — the costume she always wore after the tragic death of her son
nine years ago, for her heart broke then, and life lost almost all its value for her. The people stood grouped before
these pictures, and now and then one saw women and girls turn away wiping the tears from their eyes.

In front of the Krantz is an open square; over the way was the church where the funeral services would be held. It
is small and old and severely plain, plastered outside and whitewashed or painted, and with no ornament but a statue of
a monk in a niche over the door, and above that a small black flag. But in its crypt lie several of the great dead of
the House of Habsburg, among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon’s son, the Duke of Reichstadt. Hereabouts was a Roman
camp, once, and in it the Emperor Marcus Aurelius died a thousand years before the first Habsburg ruled in Vienna,
which was six hundred years ago and more.

The little church is packed in among great modern stores and houses, and the windows of them were full of people.
Behind the vast plate-glass windows of the upper floors of the house on the corner one glimpsed terraced masses of
fine-clothed men and women, dim and shimmery, like people under water. Under us the square was noiseless, but it was
full of citizens; officials in fine uniforms were flitting about on errands, and in a doorstep sat a figure in the
uttermost raggedness of poverty, the feet bare, the head bent humbly down; a youth of eighteen or twenty, he was, and
through the field-glass one could see that he was tearing apart and munching riffraff that he had gathered somewhere.
Blazing uniforms flashed by him, making a sparkling contrast with his drooping ruin of moldy rags, but he took not
notice; he was not there to grieve for a nation’s disaster; he had his own cares, and deeper. From two directions two
long files of infantry came plowing through the pack and press in silence; there was a low, crisp order and the crowd
vanished, the square save the sidewalks was empty, the private mourner was gone. Another order, the soldiers fell apart
and enclosed the square in a double-ranked human fence. It was all so swift, noiseless, exact — like a beautifully
ordered machine.

It was noon, now. Two hours of stillness and waiting followed. Then carriages began to flow past and deliver the two
and three hundred court personages and high nobilities privileged to enter the church. Then the square filled up; not
with civilians, but with army and navy officers in showy and beautiful uniforms. They filled it compactly, leaving only
a narrow carriage path in front of the church, but there was no civilian among them. And it was better so; dull clothes
would have marred the radiant spectacle. In the jam in front of the church, on its steps, and on the sidewalk was a
bunch of uniforms which made a blazing splotch of color — intense red, gold, and white — which dimmed the brilliancies
around them; and opposite them on the other side of the path was a bunch of cascaded bright-green plumes above
pale-blue shoulders which made another splotch of splendor emphatic and conspicuous in its glowing surroundings. It was
a sea of flashing color all about, but these two groups were the high notes. The green plumes were worn by forty or
fifty Austrian generals, the group opposite them were chiefly Knights of Malta and knights of a German order. The mass
of heads in the square were covered by gilt helmets and by military caps roofed with a mirror-like gaze, and the
movements of the wearers caused these things to catch the sun-rays, and the effect was fine to see — the square was
like a garden of richly colored flowers with a multitude of blinding and flashing little suns distributed over it.

Think of it — it was by command of that Italian loafer yonder on his imperial throne in the Geneva prison that this
splendid multitude was assembled there; and the kings and emperors that were entering the church from a side street
were there by his will. It is so strange, so unrealizable.

At three o’clock the carriages were still streaming by in single file. At three-five a cardinal arrives with his
attendants; later some bishops; then a number of archdeacons — all in striking colors that add to the show. At
three-ten a procession of priests passed along, with crucifix. Another one, presently; after an interval, two more; at
three-fifty another one — very long, with many crosses, gold-embroidered robes, and much white lace; also great
pictured banners, at intervals, receding into the distance.

A hum of tolling bells makes itself heard, but not sharply. At three-fifty-eight a waiting interval. Presently a
long procession of gentlemen in evening dress comes in sight and approaches until it is near to the square, then falls
back against the wall of soldiers at the sidewalk, and the white shirt-fronts show like snowflakes and are very
conspicuous where so much warm color is all about.

A waiting pause. At four-twelve the head of the funeral procession comes into view at last. First, a body of
cavalry, four abreast, to widen the path. Next, a great body of lancers, in blue, with gilt helmets. Next, three
six-horse mourning-coaches; outriders and coachmen in black, with cocked hats and white wigs. Next, troops in splendid
uniforms, red, gold, and white, exceedingly showy.

Now the multitude uncover. The soldiers present arms; there is a low rumble of drums; the sumptuous great hearse
approaches, drawn at a walk by eight black horses plumed with black bunches of nodding ostrich feathers; the coffin is
borne into the church, the doors are closed.

The multitude cover their heads, and the rest of the procession moves by; first the Hungarian Guard in their
indescribably brilliant and picturesque and beautiful uniform, inherited from the ages of barbaric splendor, and after
them other mounted forces, a long and showy array.

Then the shining crown in the square crumbled apart, a wrecked rainbow, and melted away in radiant streams, and in
the turn of a wrist the three dirtiest and raggedest and cheerfulest little slum-girls in Austria were capering about
in the spacious vacancy. It was a day of contrasts.

Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state. The first time was in 1854, when she was a bride of seventeen, and then
she rode in measureless pomp and with blare of music through a fluttering world of gay flags and decorations, down
streets walled on both hands with a press of shouting and welcoming subjects; and the second time was last Wednesday,
when she entered the city in her coffin and moved down the same streets in the dead of the night under swaying black
flags, between packed human walls again; but everywhere was a deep stillness, now — a stillness emphasized, rather than
broken, by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, and the low sobbing of
gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entry forty-four years before, when she and they were young — and
unaware!

A character in Baron von Berger’s recent fairy drama “Habsburg” tells about the first coming of the girlish
Empress–Queen, and in his history draws a fine picture: I cannot make a close translation of it, but will try to convey
the spirit of the verses:

I saw the stately pageant pass:

In her high place I saw the Empress–Queen:

I could not take my eyes away

From that fair vision, spirit-like and pure,

That rose serene, sublime, and figured to my sense

A noble Alp far lighted in the blue,

That in the flood of morning rends its veil of cloud

And stands a dream of glory to the gaze

Of them that in the Valley toil and plod.

A Scrap of Curious History

Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri — a village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains,
France — a village; time, the end of June, 1894. I was in the one village in that early time; I am in the other now.
These times and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that
Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long ago.

Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic was taken by an Italian assassin. Last night a
mob surrounded our hotel, shouting, howling, singing the “Marseillaise,” and pelting our windows with sticks and
stones; for we have Italian waiters, and the mob demanded that they be turned out of the house instantly — to be
drubbed, and then driven out of the village. Everybody in the hotel remained up until far into the night, and
experienced the several kinds of terror which one reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians and by
French mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival, with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the
withdrawal to rearrange plans — followed by a silence ominous, threatening, and harder to bear than even the active
siege and the noise. The landlord and the two village policemen stood their ground, and at last the mob was persuaded
to go away and leave our Italians in peace. Today four of the ringleaders have been sentenced to heavy punishment of a
public sort — and are become local heroes, by consequence.

That is the very mistake which was at first made in the Missourian village half a century ago. The mistake was
repeated and repeated — just as France is doing in these later months.

In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our Vaillants; and in a humble way our Cesario — I hope I have
spelled this name wrong. Fifty years ago we passed through, in all essentials, what France has been passing through
during the past two or three years, in the matter of periodical frights, horrors, and shudderings.

In several details the parallels are quaintly exact. In that day, for a man to speak out openly and proclaim himself
an enemy of negro slavery was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against the holiest thing
known to a Missourian, and could NOT be in his right mind. For a man to proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three
years ago, was to proclaim himself a madman — he could not be in his right mind.

Now the original first blasphemer against any institution profoundly venerated by a community is quite sure to be in
earnest; his followers and imitators may be humbugs and self-seekers, but he himself is sincere — his heart is in his
protest.

Robert Hardy was our first ABOLITIONIST— awful name! He was a journeyman cooper, and worked in the big cooper-shop
belonging to the great pork-packing establishment which was Marion City’s chief pride and sole source of prosperity. He
was a New–Englander, a stranger. And, being a stranger, he was of course regarded as an inferior person — for that has
been human nature from Adam down — and of course, also, he was made to feel unwelcome, for this is the ancient law with
man and the other animals. Hardy was thirty years old, and a bachelor; pale, given to reverie and reading. He was
reserved, and seemed to prefer the isolation which had fallen to his lot. He was treated to many side remarks by his
fellows, but as he did not resent them it was decided that he was a coward.

All of a sudden he proclaimed himself an abolitionist — straight out and publicly! He said that negro slavery was a
crime, an infamy. For a moment the town was paralyzed with astonishment; then it broke into a fury of rage and swarmed
toward the cooper-shop to lynch Hardy. But the Methodist minister made a powerful speech to them and stayed their
hands. He proved to them that Hardy was insane and not responsible for his words; that no man COULD be sane and utter
such words.

So Hardy was saved. Being insane, he was allowed to go on talking. He was found to be good entertainment. Several
nights running he made abolition speeches in the open air, and all the town flocked to hear and laugh. He implored them
to believe him sane and sincere, and have pity on the poor slaves, and take measurements for the restoration of their
stolen rights, or in no long time blood would flow — blood, blood, rivers of blood!

It was great fun. But all of a sudden the aspect of things changed. A slave came flying from Palmyra, the
county-seat, a few miles back, and was about to escape in a canoe to Illinois and freedom in the dull twilight of the
approaching dawn, when the town constable seized him. Hardy happened along and tried to rescue the negro; there was a
struggle, and the constable did not come out of it alive. Hardly crossed the river with the negro, and then came back
to give himself up. All this took time, for the Mississippi is not a French brook, like the Seine, the Loire, and those
other rivulets, but is a real river nearly a mile wide. The town was on hand in force by now, but the Methodist
preacher and the sheriff had already made arrangements in the interest of order; so Hardy was surrounded by a strong
guard and safely conveyed to the village calaboose in spite of all the effort of the mob to get hold of him. The reader
will have begun to perceive that this Methodist minister was a prompt man; a prompt man, with active hands and a good
headpiece. Williams was his name — Damon Williams; Damon Williams in public, Damnation Williams in private, because he
was so powerful on that theme and so frequent.

The excitement was prodigious. The constable was the first man who had ever been killed in the town. The event was
by long odds the most imposing in the town’s history. It lifted the humble village into sudden importance; its name was
in everybody’s mouth for twenty miles around. And so was the name of Robert Hardy — Robert Hardy, the stranger, the
despised. In a day he was become the person of most consequence in the region, the only person talked about. As to
those other coopers, they found their position curiously changed — they were important people, or unimportant, now, in
proportion as to how large or how small had been their intercourse with the new celebrity. The two or three who had
really been on a sort of familiar footing with him found themselves objects of admiring interest with the public and of
envy with their shopmates.

The village weekly journal had lately gone into new hands. The new man was an enterprising fellow, and he made the
most of the tragedy. He issued an extra. Then he put up posters promising to devote his whole paper to matters
connected with the great event — there would be a full and intensely interesting biography of the murderer, and even a
portrait of him. He was as good as his word. He carved the portrait himself, on the back of a wooden type — and a
terror it was to look at. It made a great commotion, for this was the first time the village paper had ever contained a
picture. The village was very proud. The output of the paper was ten times as great as it had ever been before, yet
every copy was sold.

When the trial came on, people came from all the farms around, and from Hannibal, and Quincy, and even from Keokuk;
and the court-house could hold only a fraction of the crowd that applied for admission. The trial was published in the
village paper, with fresh and still more trying pictures of the accused.

Hardy was convicted, and hanged — a mistake. People came from miles around to see the hanging; they brought cakes
and cider, also the women and children, and made a picnic of the matter. It was the largest crowd the village had ever
seen. The rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly bought up, in inch samples, for everybody wanted a memento of the
memorable event.

Martyrdom gilded with notoriety has its fascinations. Within one week afterward four young lightweights in the
village proclaimed themselves abolitionists! In life Hardy had not been able to make a convert; everybody laughed at
him; but nobody could laugh at his legacy. The four swaggered around with their slouch-hats pulled down over their
faces, and hinted darkly at awful possibilities. The people were troubled and afraid, and showed it. And they were
stunned, too; they could not understand it. “Abolitionist” had always been a term of shame and horror; yet here were
four young men who were not only not ashamed to bear that name, but were grimly proud of it. Respectable young men they
were, too — of good families, and brought up in the church. Ed Smith, the printer’s apprentice, nineteen, had been the
head Sunday-school boy, and had once recited three thousand Bible verses without making a break. Dick Savage, twenty,
the baker’s apprentice; Will Joyce, twenty-two, journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four, tobacco-stemmer —
were the other three. They were all of a sentimental cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such
as it was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been suspected of having anything bad in them.

They withdrew from society, and grew more and more mysterious and dreadful. They presently achieved the distinction
of being denounced by names from the pulpit — which made an immense stir! This was grandeur, this was fame. They were
envied by all the other young fellows now. This was natural. Their company grew — grew alarmingly. They took a name. It
was a secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were simply the abolitionists. They had pass-words,
grips, and signs; they had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with gloomy pomps and ceremonies, at
midnight.

They always spoke of Hardy as “the Martyr,” and every little while they moved through the principal street in
procession — at midnight, black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn drum — on pilgrimage to the Martyr’s
grave, where they went through with some majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his murderers. They gave previous
notice of the pilgrimage by small posters, and warned everybody to keep indoors and darken all houses along the route,
and leave the road empty. These warnings were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones at the top of the
poster.

When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks, a quite natural thing happened. A few men of character
and grit woke up out of the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying their faculties, and began to discharge scorn
and scoffings at themselves and the community for enduring this child’s-play; and at the same time they proposed to end
it straightway. Everybody felt an uplift; life was breathed into their dead spirits; their courage rose and they began
to feel like men again. This was on a Saturday. All day the new feeling grew and strengthened; it grew with a rush; it
brought inspiration and cheer with it. Midnight saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and with a clearly
defined and welcome piece of work in front of it. The best organizer and strongest and bitterest talker on that great
Saturday was the Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the original four from his pulpit — Rev. Hiram Fletcher — and
he promised to use his pulpit in the public interest again now. On the morrow he had revelations to make, he said —
secrets of the dreadful society.

But the revelations were never made. At half past two in the morning the dead silence of the village was broken by a
crashing explosion, and the town patrol saw the preacher’s house spring in a wreck of whirling fragments into the sky.
The preacher was killed, together with a negro woman, his only slave and servant.

The town was paralyzed again, and with reason. To struggle against a visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there
is a plenty of men who stand always ready to undertake it; but to struggle against an invisible one — an invisible one
who sneaks in and does his awful work in the dark and leaves no trace — that is another matter. That is a thing to make
the bravest tremble and hold back.

The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral. The man who was to have had a packed church to hear him expose
and denounce the common enemy had but a handful to see him buried. The coroner’s jury had brought in a verdict of
“death by the visitation of God,” for no witness came forward; if any existed they prudently kept out of the way.
Nobody seemed sorry. Nobody wanted to see the terrible secret society provoked into the commission of further outrages.
Everybody wanted the tragedy hushed up, ignored, forgotten, if possible.

And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when Will Joyce, the blacksmith’s journeyman, came out and
proclaimed himself the assassin! Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of his glory. He made his proclamation, and
stuck to it. Stuck to it, and insisted upon a trial. Here was an ominous thing; here was a new and peculiarly
formidable terror, for a motive was revealed here which society could not hope to deal with successfully — VANITY,
thirst for notoriety. If men were going to kill for notoriety’s sake, and to win the glory of newspaper renown, a big
trial, and a showy execution, what possible invention of man could discourage or deter them? The town was in a sort of
panic; it did not know what to do.

However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter — it had no choice. It brought in a true bill, and presently
the case went to the county court. The trial was a fine sensation. The prisoner was the principal witness for the
prosecution. He gave a full account of the assassination; he furnished even the minutest particulars: how he deposited
his keg of powder and laid his train — from the house to such-and-such a spot; how George Ronalds and Henry Hart came
along just then, smoking, and he borrowed Hart’s cigar and fired the train with it, shouting, “Down with all
slave-tyrants!” and how Hart and Ronalds made no effort to capture him, but ran away, and had never come forward to
testify yet.

But they had to testify now, and they did — and pitiful it was to see how reluctant they were, and how scared. The
crowded house listened to Joyce’s fearful tale with a profound and breathless interest, and in a deep hush which was
not broken till he broke it himself, in concluding, with a roaring repetition of his “Death to all slave-tyrants!” —
which came so unexpectedly and so startlingly that it made everyone present catch his breath and gasp.

The trial was put in the paper, with biography and large portrait, with other slanderous and insane pictures, and
the edition sold beyond imagination.

The execution of Joyce was a fine and picturesque thing. It drew a vast crowd. Good places in trees and seats on
rail fences sold for half a dollar apiece; lemonade and gingerbread-stands had great prosperity. Joyce recited a
furious and fantastic and denunciatory speech on the scaffold which had imposing passages of school-boy eloquence in
it, and gave him a reputation on the spot as an orator, and his name, later, in the society’s records, of the “Martyr
Orator.” He went to his death breathing slaughter and charging his society to “avenge his murder.” If he knew anything
of human nature he knew that to plenty of young fellows present in that great crowd he was a grand hero — and enviably
situated.

He was hanged. It was a mistake. Within a month from his death the society which he had honored had twenty new
members, some of them earnest, determined men. They did not court distinction in the same way, but they celebrated his
martyrdom. The crime which had been obscure and despised had become lofty and glorified.

Such things were happening all over the country. Wild-brained martyrdom was succeeded by uprising and organization.
Then, in natural order, followed riot, insurrection, and the wrack and restitutions of war. It was bound to come, and
it would naturally come in that way. It has been the manner of reform since the beginning of the world.

Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty

Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891.

It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last. In that remote time there was only one ladder railway in
the country. That state of things is all changed. There isn’t a mountain in Switzerland now that hasn’t a ladder
railroad or two up its back like suspenders; indeed, some mountains are latticed with them, and two years hence all
will be. In that day the peasant of the high altitudes will have to carry a lantern when he goes visiting in the night
to keep from stumbling over railroads that have been built since his last round. And also in that day, if there shall
remain a high-altitude peasant whose potato-patch hasn’t a railroad through it, it would make him as conspicuous as
William Tell.

However, there are only two best ways to travel through Switzerland. The first best is afloat. The second best is by
open two-horse carriage. One can come from Lucerne to Interlaken over the Brunig by ladder railroad in an hour or so
now, but you can glide smoothly in a carriage in ten, and have two hours for luncheon at noon — for luncheon, not for
rest. There is no fatigue connected with the trip. One arrives fresh in spirit and in person in the evening — no fret
in his heart, no grime on his face, no grit in his hair, not a cinder in his eye. This is the right condition of mind
and body, the right and due preparation for the solemn event which closed the day — stepping with metaphorically
uncovered head into the presence of the most impressive mountain mass that the globe can show — the Jungfrau. The
stranger’s first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow,
is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven’s gates had swung open and exposed the throne.

It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken. Nothing going on — at least nothing but brilliant life-giving
sunshine. There are floods and floods of that. One may properly speak of it as “going on,” for it is full of the
suggestion of activity; the light pours down with energy, with visible enthusiasm. This is a good atmosphere to be in,
morally as well as physically. After trying the political atmosphere of the neighboring monarchies, it is healing and
refreshing to breathe air that has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years, and to come among a people whose
political history is great and fine, and worthy to be taught in all schools and studied by all races and peoples. For
the struggle here throughout the centuries has not been in the interest of any private family, or any church, but in
the interest of the whole body of the nation, and for shelter and protection of all forms of belief. This fact is
colossal. If one would realize how colossal it is, and of what dignity and majesty, let him contrast it with the
purposes and objects of the Crusades, the siege of York, the War of the Roses, and other historic comedies of that sort
and size.

Last week I was beating around the Lake of Four Cantons, and I saw Rutli and Altorf. Rutli is a remote little patch
of meadow, but I do not know how any piece of ground could be holier or better worth crossing oceans and continents to
see, since it was there that the great trinity of Switzerland joined hands six centuries ago and swore the oath which
set their enslaved and insulted country forever free; and Altorf is also honorable ground and worshipful, since it was
there that William, surnamed Tell (which interpreted means “The foolish talker” — that is to say, the too-daring
talker), refused to bow to Gessler’s hat. Of late years the prying student of history has been delighting himself
beyond measure over a wonderful find which he has made — to wit, that Tell did not shoot the apple from his son’s head.
To hear the students jubilate, one would suppose that the question of whether Tell shot the apple or didn’t was an
important matter; whereas it ranks in importance exactly with the question of whether Washington chopped down the
cherry-tree or didn’t. The deeds of Washington, the patriot, are the essential thing; the cherry-tree incident is of no
consequence. To prove that Tell did shoot the apple from his son’s head would merely prove that he had better nerve
than most men and was skillful with a bow as a million others who preceded and followed him, but not one whit more so.
But Tell was more and better than a mere marksman, more and better than a mere cool head; he was a type; he stands for
Swiss patriotism; in his person was represented a whole people; his spirit was their spirit — the spirit which would
bow to none but God, the spirit which said this in words and confirmed it with deeds. There have always been Tells in
Switzerland — people who would not bow. There was a sufficiency of them at Rutli; there were plenty of them at Murten;
plenty at Grandson; there are plenty today. And the first of them all — the very first, earliest banner-bearer of human
freedom in this world — was not a man, but a woman — Stauffacher’s wife. There she looms dim and great, through the
haze of the centuries, delivering into her husband’s ear that gospel of revolt which was to bear fruit in the
conspiracy of Rutli and the birth of the first free government the world had ever seen.

From this Victoria Hotel one looks straight across a flat of trifling width to a lofty mountain barrier, which has a
gateway in it shaped like an inverted pyramid. Beyond this gateway arises the vast bulk of the Jungfrau, a spotless
mass of gleaming snow, into the sky. The gateway, in the dark-colored barrier, makes a strong frame for the great
picture. The somber frame and the glowing snow-pile are startlingly contrasted. It is this frame which concentrates and
emphasizes the glory of the Jungfrau and makes it the most engaging and beguiling and fascinating spectacle that exists
on the earth. There are many mountains of snow that are as lofty as the Jungfrau and as nobly proportioned, but they
lack the fame. They stand at large; they are intruded upon and elbowed by neighboring domes and summits, and their
grandeur is diminished and fails of effect.

It is a good name, Jungfrau — Virgin. Nothing could be whiter; nothing could be purer; nothing could be saintlier of
aspect. At six yesterday evening the great intervening barrier seen through a faint bluish haze seemed made of air and
substanceless, so soft and rich it was, so shimmering where the wandering lights touched it and so dim where the
shadows lay. Apparently it was a dream stuff, a work of the imagination, nothing real about it. The tint was green,
slightly varying shades of it, but mainly very dark. The sun was down — as far as that barrier was concerned, but not
for the Jungfrau, towering into the heavens beyond the gateway. She was a roaring conflagration of blinding white.

It is said the Fridolin (the old Fridolin), a new saint, but formerly a missionary, gave the mountain its gracious
name. He was an Irishman, son of an Irish king — there were thirty thousand kings reigning in County Cork alone in his
time, fifteen hundred years ago. It got so that they could not make a living, there was so much competition and wages
got cut so. Some of them were out of work months at a time, with wife and little children to feed, and not a crust in
the place. At last a particularly severe winter fell upon the country, and hundreds of them were reduced to mendicancy
and were to be seen day after day in the bitterest weather, standing barefoot in the snow, holding out their crowns for
alms. Indeed, they would have been obliged to emigrate or starve but for a fortunate idea of Prince Fridolin’s, who
started a labor-union, the first one in history, and got the great bulk of them to join it. He thus won the general
gratitude, and they wanted to make him emperor — emperor over them all — emperor of County Cork, but he said, No,
walking delegate was good enough for him. For behold! he was modest beyond his years, and keen as a whip. To this day
in Germany and Switzerland, where St. Fridolin is revered and honored, the peasantry speak of him affectionately as the
first walking delegate.

The first walk he took was into France and Germany, missionarying — for missionarying was a better thing in those
days than it is in ours. All you had to do was to cure the savage’s sick daughter by a “miracle” — a miracle like the
miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance — and immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes
with a new convert’s enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself easy, now. He would take an ax and convert the
rest of the nation himself. Charlemagne was that kind of a walking delegate.

Yes, there were great missionaries in those days, for the methods were sure and the rewards great. We have no such
missionaries now, and no such methods.

But to continue the history of the first walking delegate, if you are interested. I am interested myself because I
have seen his relics in Sackingen, and also the very spot where he worked his great miracle — the one which won him his
sainthood in the papal court a few centuries later. To have seen these things makes me feel very near to him, almost
like a member of the family, in fact. While wandering about the Continent he arrived at the spot on the Rhine which is
now occupied by Sackingen, and proposed to settle there, but the people warned him off. He appealed to the king of the
Franks, who made him a present of the whole region, people and all. He built a great cloister there for women and
proceeded to teach in it and accumulate more land. There were two wealthy brothers in the neighborhood, Urso and
Landulph. Urso died and Fridolin claimed his estates. Landulph asked for documents and papers. Fridolin had none to
show. He said the bequest had been made to him by word of mouth. Landulph suggested that he produce a witness and said
it in a way which he thought was very witty, very sarcastic. This shows that he did not know the walking delegate.
Fridolin was not disturbed. He said:

“Appoint your court. I will bring a witness.”

The court thus created consisted of fifteen counts and barons. A day was appointed for the trial of the case. On
that day the judges took their seats in state, and proclamation was made that the court was ready for business. Five
minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes passed, and yet no Fridolin appeared. Landulph rose, and was in the act of
claiming judgment by default when a strange clacking sound was heard coming up the stairs. In another moment Fridolin
entered at the door and came walking in a deep hush down the middle aisle, with a tall skeleton stalking in his
rear.

Amazement and terror sat upon every countenance, for everybody suspected that the skeleton was Urso’s. It stopped
before the chief judge and raised its bony arm aloft and began to speak, while all the assembled shuddered, for they
could see the words leak out between its ribs. It said:

“Brother, why dost thou disturb my blessed rest and withhold by robbery the gift which I gave thee for the honor of
God?”

It seems a strange thing and most irregular, but the verdict was actually given against Landulph on the testimony of
this wandering rack-heap of unidentified bones. In our day a skeleton would not be allowed to testify at all, for a
skeleton has no moral responsibility, and its word could not be believed on oath, and this was probably one of them.
However, the incident is valuable as preserving to us a curious sample of the quaint laws of evidence of that remote
time — a time so remote, so far back toward the beginning of original idiocy, that the difference between a bench of
judges and a basket of vegetables was as yet so slight that we may say with all confidence that it didn’t really
exist.

During several afternoons I have been engaged in an interesting, maybe useful, piece of work — that is to say, I
have been trying to make the mighty Jungfrau earn her living — earn it in a most humble sphere, but on a prodigious
scale, on a prodigious scale of necessity, for she couldn’t do anything in a small way with her size and style. I have
been trying to make her do service on a stupendous dial and check off the hours as they glide along her pallid face up
there against the sky, and tell the time of day to the populations lying within fifty miles of her and to the people in
the moon, if they have a good telescope there.

Until late in the afternoon the Jungfrau’s aspect is that of a spotless desert of snow set upon edge against the
sky. But by mid-afternoon some elevations which rise out of the western border of the desert, whose presence you
perhaps had not detected or suspected up to that time, began to cast black shadows eastward across the gleaming
surface. At first there is only one shadow; later there are two. Toward 4 P.M. the other day I was gazing and
worshiping as usual when I chanced to notice that shadow No. 1 was beginning to take itself something of the shape of
the human profile. By four the back of the head was good, the military cap was pretty good, the nose was bold and
strong, the upper lip sharp, but not pretty, and there was a great goatee that shot straight aggressively forward from
the chin.

At four-thirty the nose had changed its shape considerably, and the altered slant of the sun had revealed and made
conspicuous a huge buttress or barrier of naked rock which was so located as to answer very well for a shoulder or
coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his
head on the Virgin’s white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous music of the crashing
ice-domes and the boom and thunder of the passing avalanche — music very familiar to his ear, for he had heard it every
afternoon at this hour since the day he first came courting this child of the earth, who lives in the sky, and that day
is far, yes — for he was at this pleasant sport before the Middle Ages drifted by him in the valley; before the Romans
marched past, and before the antique and recordless barbarians fished and hunted here and wondered who he might be, and
were probably afraid of him; and before primeval man himself, just emerged from his four-footed estate, stepped out
upon this plain, first sample of his race, a thousand centuries ago, and cast a glad eye up there, judging he had found
a brother human being and consequently something to kill; and before the big saurians wallowed here, still some eons
earlier. Oh yes, a day so far back that the eternal son was present to see that first visit; a day so far back that
neither tradition nor history was born yet and a whole weary eternity must come and go before the restless little
creature, of whose face this stupendous Shadow Face was the prophecy, would arrive in the earth and begin his shabby
career and think of a big thing. Oh, indeed yes; when you talk about your poor Roman and Egyptian day-before-yesterday
antiquities, you should choose a time when the hoary Shadow Face of the Jungfrau is not by. It antedates all
antiquities known or imaginable; for it was here the world itself created the theater of future antiquities. And it is
the only witness with a human face that was there to see the marvel, and remains to us a memorial of it.

By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is beautiful. It is black and is powerfully marked against the
upright canvas of glowing snow, and covers hundreds of acres of that resplendent surface.

Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear of the face west of it — and at five o’clock has
assumed a shape that has rather a poor and rude semblance of a shoe.

Meantime, also, the great Shadow Face has been gradually changing for twenty minutes, and now, 5 P.M., it is
becoming a quite fair portrait of Roscoe Conkling. The likeness is there, and is unmistakable. The goatee is shortened,
now, and has an end; formerly it hadn’t any, but ran off eastward and arrived nowhere.

By 6 P.M. the face has dissolved and gone, and the goatee has become what looks like the shadow of a tower with a
pointed roof, and the shoe had turned into what the printers call a “fist” with a finger pointing.

If I were now imprisoned on a mountain summit a hundred miles northward of this point, and was denied a timepiece, I
could get along well enough from four till six on clear days, for I could keep trace of the time by the changing shapes
of these mighty shadows of the Virgin’s front, the most stupendous dial I am acquainted with, the oldest clock in the
world by a couple of million years.

I suppose I should not have noticed the forms of the shadows if I hadn’t the habit of hunting for faces in the
clouds and in mountain crags — a sort of amusement which is very entertaining even when you don’t find any, and
brilliantly satisfying when you do. I have searched through several bushels of photographs of the Jungfrau here, but
found only one with the Face in it, and in this case it was not strictly recognizable as a face, which was evidence
that the picture was taken before four o’clock in the afternoon, and also evidence that all the photographers have
persistently overlooked one of the most fascinating features of the Jungfrau show. I say fascinating, because if you
once detect a human face produced on a great plan by unconscious nature, you never get tired of watching it. At first
you can’t make another person see it at all, but after he has made it out once he can’t see anything else
afterward.

The King of Greece is a man who goes around quietly enough when off duty. One day this summer he was traveling in an
ordinary first-class compartment, just in his other suit, the one which he works the realm in when he is at home, and
so he was not looking like anybody in particular, but a good deal like everybody in general. By and by a hearty and
healthy German–American got in and opened up a frank and interesting and sympathetic conversation with him, and asked
him a couple of thousand questions about himself, which the king answered good-naturedly, but in a more or less
indefinite way as to private particulars.

“Where do you live when you are at home?”

“In Greece.”

“Greece! Well, now, that is just astonishing! Born there?”

“No.”

“Do you speak Greek?”

“Yes.”

“Now, ain’t that strange! I never expected to live to see that. What is your trade? I mean how do you get your
living? What is your line of business?”

“Well, I hardly know how to answer. I am only a kind of foreman, on a salary; and the business — well, is a very
general kind of business.”

“Well, partly; but not entirely. Of course I do a stroke of business if it falls in the way — ”

“Good! I like that in you! That’s me every time. Go on.”

“I was only going to say I am off on my vacation now.”

“Well that’s all right. No harm in that. A man works all the better for a little let-up now and then. Not that I’ve
been used to having it myself; for I haven’t. I reckon this is my first. I was born in Germany, and when I was a couple
of weeks old shipped to America, and I’ve been there ever since, and that’s sixty-four years by the watch. I’m an
American in principle and a German at heart, and it’s the boss combination. Well, how do you get along, as a rule —
pretty fair?”

“I’ve a rather large family — ”

“There, that’s it — big family and trying to raise them on a salary. Now, what did you go to do that for?”

“Well, I thought — ”

“Of course you did. You were young and confident and thought you could branch out and make things go with a whirl,
and here you are, you see! But never mind about that. I’m not trying to discourage you. Dear me! I’ve been just where
you are myself! You’ve got good grit; there’s good stuff in you, I can see that. You got a wrong start, that’s the
whole trouble. But you hold your grip, and we’ll see what can be done. Your case ain’t half as bad as it might be. You
are going to come out all right — I’m bail for that. Boys and girls?”

“My family? Yes, some of them are boys — ”

“And the rest girls. It’s just as I expected. But that’s all right, and it’s better so, anyway. What are the boys
doing — learning a trade?”

“Well, no — I thought — ”

“It’s a big mistake. It’s the biggest mistake you ever made. You see that in your own case. A man ought always to
have a trade to fall back on. Now, I was harness-maker at first. Did that prevent me from becoming one of the biggest
brewers in America? Oh no. I always had the harness trick to fall back on in rough weather. Now, if you had learned how
to make harness — However, it’s too late now; too late. But it’s no good plan to cry over spilt milk. But as to the
boys, you see — what’s to become of them if anything happens to you?”

“It has been my idea to let the eldest one succeed me — ”

“Oh, come! Suppose the firm don’t want him?”

“I hadn’t thought of that, but — ”

“Now, look here; you want to get right down to business and stop dreaming. You are capable of immense things — man.
You can make a perfect success in life. All you want is somebody to steady you and boost you along on the right road.
Do you own anything in the business?”

“No — not exactly; but if I continue to give satisfaction, I suppose I can keep my — ”

“Keep your place — yes. Well, don’t you depend on anything of the kind. They’ll bounce you the minute you get a
little old and worked out; they’ll do it sure. Can’t you manage somehow to get into the firm? That’s the great thing,
you know.”

“I think it is doubtful; very doubtful.”

“Um — that’s bad — yes, and unfair, too. Do you suppose that if I should go there and have a talk with your people —
Look here — do you think you could run a brewery?”

“I have never tried, but I think I could do it after a little familiarity with the business.”

The German was silent for some time. He did a good deal of thinking, and the king waited curiously to see what the
result was going to be. Finally the German said:

“My mind’s made up. You leave that crowd — you’ll never amount to anything there. In these old countries they never
give a fellow a show. Yes, you come over to America — come to my place in Rochester; bring the family along. You shall
have a show in the business and the foremanship, besides. George — you said your name was George? — I’ll make a man of
you. I give you my word. You’ve never had a chance here, but that’s all going to change. By gracious! I’ll give you a
lift that’ll make your hair curl!”

At the Shrine of St. Wagner

Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891

It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It had
been long since we had seen such multitudes of excited and struggling people. It took a good half-hour to pack them and
pair them into the train — and it was the longest train we have yet seen in Europe. Nuremberg had been witnessing this
sort of experience a couple of times a day for about two weeks. It gives one an impressive sense of the magnitude of
this biennial pilgrimage. For a pilgrimage is what it is. The devotees come from the very ends of the earth to worship
their prophet in his own Kaaba in his own Mecca.

If you are living in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or anywhere else in America, and you conclude, by the
middle of May, that you would like to attend the Bayreuth opera two months and a half later, you must use the cable and
get about it immediately or you will get no seats, and you must cable for lodgings, too. Then if you are lucky you will
get seats in the last row and lodgings in the fringe of the town. If you stop to write you will get nothing. There were
plenty of people in Nuremberg when we passed through who had come on pilgrimage without first securing seats and
lodgings. They had found neither in Bayreuth; they had walked Bayreuth streets a while in sorrow, then had gone to
Nuremberg and found neither beds nor standing room, and had walked those quaint streets all night, waiting for the
hotels to open and empty their guests into trains, and so make room for these, their defeated brethren and sisters in
the faith. They had endured from thirty to forty hours’ railroading on the continent of Europe — with all which that
implies of worry, fatigue, and financial impoverishment — and all they had got and all they were to get for it was
handiness and accuracy in kicking themselves, acquired by practice in the back streets of the two towns when other
people were in bed; for back they must go over that unspeakable journey with their pious mission unfulfilled. These
humiliated outcasts had the frowsy and unbrushed and apologetic look of wet cats, and their eyes were glazed with
drowsiness, their bodies were adroop from crown to sole, and all kind-hearted people refrained from asking them if they
had been to Bayreuth and failed to connect, as knowing they would lie.

We reached here (Bayreuth) about mid-afternoon of a rainy Saturday. We were of the wise, and had secured lodgings
and opera seats months in advance.

I am not a musical critic, and did not come here to write essays about the operas and deliver judgment upon their
merits. The little children of Bayreuth could do that with a finer sympathy and a broader intelligence than I. I only
care to bring four or five pilgrims to the operas, pilgrims able to appreciate them and enjoy them. What I write about
the performance to put in my odd time would be offered to the public as merely a cat’s view of a king, and not of
didactic value.

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house — that is to say, the Wagner temple — a little after the
middle of the afternoon. The great building stands all by itself, grand and lonely, on a high ground outside the town.
We were warned that if we arrived after four o’clock we should be obliged to pay two dollars and a half extra by way of
fine. We saved that; and it may be remarked here that this is the only opportunity that Europe offers of saving money.
There was a big crowd in the grounds about the building, and the ladies’ dresses took the sun with fine effect. I do
not mean to intimate that the ladies were in full dress, for that was not so. The dresses were pretty, but neither sex
was in evening dress.

The interior of the building is simple — severely so; but there is no occasion for color and decoration, since the
people sit in the dark. The auditorium has the shape of a keystone, with the stage at the narrow end. There is an aisle
on each side, but no aisle in the body of the house. Each row of seats extends in an unbroken curve from one side of
the house to the other. There are seven entrance doors on each side of the theater and four at the butt, eighteen doors
to admit and emit 1,650 persons. The number of the particular door by which you are to enter the house or leave it is
printed on your ticket, and you can use no door but that one. Thus, crowding and confusion are impossible. Not so many
as a hundred people use any one door. This is better than having the usual (and useless) elaborate fireproof
arrangements. It is the model theater of the world. It can be emptied while the second hand of a watch makes its
circuit. It would be entirely safe, even if it were built of lucifer matches.

If your seat is near the center of a row and you enter late you must work your way along a rank of about twenty-five
ladies and gentlemen to get to it. Yet this causes no trouble, for everybody stands up until all the seats are full,
and the filling is accomplished in a very few minutes. Then all sit down, and you have a solid mass of fifteen hundred
heads, making a steep cellar-door slant from the rear of the house down to the stage.

All the lights were turned low, so low that the congregation sat in a deep and solemn gloom. The funereal rustling
of dresses and the low buzz of conversation began to die swiftly down, and presently not the ghost of a sound was left.
This profound and increasingly impressive stillness endured for some time — the best preparation for music, spectacle,
or speech conceivable. I should think our show people would have invented or imported that simple and impressive device
for securing and solidifying the attention of an audience long ago; instead of which there continue to this day to open
a performance against a deadly competition in the form of noise, confusion, and a scattered interest.

Finally, out of darkness and distance and mystery soft rich notes rose upon the stillness, and from his grave the
dead magician began to weave his spells about his disciples and steep their souls in his enchantments. There was
something strangely impressive in the fancy which kept intruding itself that the composer was conscious in his grave of
what was going on here, and that these divine sounds were the clothing of thoughts which were at this moment passing
through his brain, and not recognized and familiar ones which had issued from it at some former time.

The entire overture, long as it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was
delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a
Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see
a Wagner opera done in pantomime once. Then one would have the lovely orchestration unvexed to listen to and bathe his
spirit in, and the bewildering beautiful scenery to intoxicate his eyes with, and the dumb acting couldn’t mar these
pleasures, because there isn’t often anything in the Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting;
as a rule all you would see would be a couple of silent people, one of them standing still, the other catching flies.
Of course I do not really mean that he would be catching flies; I only mean that the usual operatic gestures which
consist in reaching first one hand out into the air and then the other might suggest the sport I speak of if the
operator attended strictly to business and uttered no sound.

This present opera was “Parsifal.” Madame Wagner does not permit its representation anywhere but in Bayreuth. The
first act of the three occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.

I trust that I know as well as anybody that singing is one of the most entrancing and bewitching and moving and
eloquent of all the vehicles invented by man for the conveying of feeling; but it seems to me that the chief virtue in
song is melody, air, tune, rhythm, or what you please to call it, and that when this feature is absent what remains is
a picture with the color left out. I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of “Parsifal” anything that might with
confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody; one person performed at a time — and a long time, too — often in a
noble, and always in a high-toned, voice; but he only pulled out long notes, then some short ones, then another long
one, then a sharp, quick, peremptory bark or two — and so on and so on; and when he was done you saw that the
information which he had conveyed had not compensated for the disturbance. Not always, but pretty often. If two of them
would but put in a duet occasionally and blend the voices; but no, they don’t do that. The great master, who knew so
well how to make a hundred instruments rejoice in unison and pour out their souls in mingled and melodious tides of
delicious sound, deals only in barren solos when he puts in the vocal parts. It may be that he was deep, and only added
the singing to his operas for the sake of the contrast it would make with the music. Singing! It does seem the wrong
name to apply to it. Strictly described, it is a practicing of difficult and unpleasant intervals, mainly. An ignorant
person gets tired of listening to gymnastic intervals in the long run, no matter how pleasant they may be. In
“Parsifal” there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first
one and then another character of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die.

During the evening there was an intermission of three-quarters of an hour after the first act and one an hour long
after the second. In both instances the theater was totally emptied. People who had previously engaged tables in the
one sole eating-house were able to put in their time very satisfactorily; the other thousand went hungry. The opera was
concluded at ten in the evening or a little later. When we reached home we had been gone more than seven hours. Seven
hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.

While browsing about the front yard among the crowd between the acts I encountered twelve or fifteen friends from
different parts of America, and those of them who were most familiar with Wagner said that “Parsifal” seldom pleased at
first, but that after one had heard it several times it was almost sure to become a favorite. It seemed impossible, but
it was true, for the statement came from people whose word was not to be doubted.

And I gathered some further information. On the ground I found part of a German musical magazine, and in it a letter
written by Uhlic thirty-three years ago, in which he defends the scorned and abused Wagner against people like me, who
found fault with the comprehensive absence of what our kind regards as singing. Uhlic says Wagner despised “JENE
PLAPPERUDE MUSIC,” and therefore “runs, trills, and SCHNORKEL are discarded by him.” I don’t know what a SCHNORKEL is,
but now that I know it has been left out of these operas I never have missed so much in my life. And Uhlic further says
that Wagner’s song is true: that it is “simply emphasized intoned speech.” That certainly describes it — in “Parsifal”
and some of the operas; and if I understand Uhlic’s elaborate German he apologizes for the beautiful airs in
“Tannhauser.” Very well; now that Wagner and I understand each other, perhaps we shall get along better, and I shall
stop calling Waggner, on the American plan, and thereafter call him Waggner as per German custom, for I feel entirely
friendly now. The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios
and pronounce his name right!

Of course I came home wondering why people should come from all corners of America to hear these operas, when we
have lately had a season or two of them in New York with these same singers in the several parts, and possibly this
same orchestra. I resolved to think that out at all hazards.

TUESDAY. — Yesterday they played the only operatic favorite I have ever had — an opera which has always driven me
mad with ignorant delight whenever I have heard it — “Tannhauser.” I heard it first when I was a youth; I heard it last
in the last German season in New York. I was busy yesterday and I did not intend to go, knowing I should have another
“Tannhauser” opportunity in a few days; but after five o’clock I found myself free and walked out to the opera-house
and arrived about the beginning of the second act. My opera ticket admitted me to the grounds in front, past the
policeman and the chain, and I thought I would take a rest on a bench for an hour and two and wait for the third
act.

In a moment or so the first bugles blew, and the multitude began to crumble apart and melt into the theater. I will
explain that this bugle-call is one of the pretty features here. You see, the theater is empty, and hundreds of the
audience are a good way off in the feeding-house; the first bugle-call is blown about a quarter of an hour before time
for the curtain to rise. This company of buglers, in uniform, march out with military step and send out over the
landscape a few bars of the theme of the approaching act, piercing the distances with the gracious notes; then they
march to the other entrance and repeat. Presently they do this over again. Yesterday only about two hundred people were
still left in front of the house when the second call was blown; in another half-minute they would have been in the
house, but then a thing happened which delayed them — the only solitary thing in this world which could be relied on
with certainty to accomplish it, I suppose — an imperial princess appeared in the balcony above them. They stopped dead
in their tracks and began to gaze in a stupor of gratitude and satisfaction. The lady presently saw that she must
disappear or the doors would be closed upon these worshipers, so she returned to her box. This daughter-in-law of an
emperor was pretty; she had a kind face; she was without airs; she is known to be full of common human sympathies.
There are many kinds of princesses, but this kind is the most harmful of all, for wherever they go they reconcile
people to monarchy and set back the clock of progress. The valuable princes, the desirable princes, are the czars and
their sort. By their mere dumb presence in the world they cover with derision every argument that can be invented in
favor of royalty by the most ingenious casuist. In his time the husband of this princess was valuable. He led a
degraded life, he ended it with his own hand in circumstances and surroundings of a hideous sort, and was buried like a
god.

In the opera-house there is a long loft back of the audience, a kind of open gallery, in which princes are
displayed. It is sacred to them; it is the holy of holies. As soon as the filling of the house is about complete the
standing multitude turn and fix their eyes upon the princely layout and gaze mutely and longingly and adoringly and
regretfully like sinners looking into heaven. They become rapt, unconscious, steeped in worship. There is no spectacle
anywhere that is more pathetic than this. It is worth crossing many oceans to see. It is somehow not the same gaze that
people rivet upon a Victor Hugo, or Niagara, or the bones of the mastodon, or the guillotine of the Revolution, or the
great pyramid, or distant Vesuvius smoking in the sky, or any man long celebrated to you by his genius and
achievements, or thing long celebrated to you by the praises of books and pictures — no, that gaze is only the gaze of
intense curiosity, interest, wonder, engaged in drinking delicious deep draughts that taste good all the way down and
appease and satisfy the thirst of a lifetime. Satisfy it — that is the word. Hugo and the mastodon will still have a
degree of intense interest thereafter when encountered, but never anything approaching the ecstasy of that first view.
The interest of a prince is different. It may be envy, it may be worship, doubtless it is a mixture of both — and it
does not satisfy its thirst with one view, or even noticeably diminish it. Perhaps the essence of the thing is the
value which men attach to a valuable something which has come by luck and not been earned. A dollar picked up in the
road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stocks
snuggles into your heart in the same way. A prince picks up grandeur, power, and a permanent holiday and gratis support
by a pure accident, the accident of birth, and he stands always before the grieved eye of poverty and obscurity a
monumental representative of luck. And then — supremest value of all-his is the only high fortune on the earth which is
secure. The commercial millionaire may become a beggar; the illustrious statesman can make a vital mistake and be
dropped and forgotten; the illustrious general can lose a decisive battle and with it the consideration of men; but
once a prince always a prince — that is to say, an imitation god, and neither hard fortune nor an infamous character
nor an addled brain nor the speech of an ass can undeify him. By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the
most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved. It follows without doubt or
question, then, that the most desirable position possible is that of a prince. And I think it also follows that the
so-called usurpations with which history is littered are the most excusable misdemeanors which men have committed. To
usurp a usurpation — that is all it amounts to, isn’t it?

A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not been taught to regard him as a god, and so
one good look at him is likely to so nearly appease our curiosity as to make him an object of no greater interest the
next time. We want a fresh one. But it is not so with the European. I am quite sure of it. The same old one will
answer; he never stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an Englishman’s house on a bleak and foggy
and dismal December afternoon to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an hour and then
they arrived, frozen. They explained that they had been delayed by an unlooked-for circumstance: while passing in the
neighborhood of Marlborough House they saw a crowd gathering and were told that the Prince of Wales was about to drive
out, so they stopped to get a sight of him. They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk, freezing with the crowd, but
were disappointed at last — the Prince had changed his mind. I said, with a good deal of surprise, “Is it possible that
you two have lived in London all your lives and have never seen the Prince of Wales?”

Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: “What an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of
times.”

They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst
of a jam of patients from the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a stupefying statement, but one is
obliged to believe the English, even when they say a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this
one:

“I can’t understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I doubt if I would do that even to get a sight of
him.” With a slight emphasis on the last word.

Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in. Then they said, blankly: “Of course not. He
is only a President.”

It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an interest not subject to deterioration. The general
who was never defeated, the general who never held a council of war, the only general who ever commanded a connected
battle-front twelve hundred miles long, the smith who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and
re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies present and to come, was really a person of no
serious consequence to these people. To them, with their training, my General was only a man, after all, while their
Prince was clearly much more than that — a being of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and being of no
more blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles
of commerce that sputter and die and leave nothing behind but a pinch of ashes and a stink.

I saw the last act of “Tannhauser.” I sat in the gloom and the deep stillness, waiting — one minute, two minutes, I
do not know exactly how long — then the soft music of the hidden orchestra began to breathe its rich, long sighs out
from under the distant stage, and by and by the drop-curtain parted in the middle and was drawn softly aside,
disclosing the twilighted wood and a wayside shrine, with a white-robed girl praying and a man standing near. Presently
that noble chorus of men’s voices was heard approaching, and from that moment until the closing of the curtain it was
music, just music — music to make one drunk with pleasure, music to make one take scrip and staff and beg his way round
the globe to hear it.

To such as are intending to come here in the Wagner season next year I wish to say, bring your dinner-pail with you.
If you do, you will never cease to be thankful. If you do not, you will find it a hard fight to save yourself from
famishing in Bayreuth. Bayreuth is merely a large village, and has no very large hotels or eating-houses. The principal
inns are the Golden Anchor and the Sun. At either of these places you can get an excellent meal — no, I mean you can go
there and see other people get it. There is no charge for this. The town is littered with restaurants, but they are
small and bad, and they are overdriven with custom. You must secure a table hours beforehand, and often when you arrive
you will find somebody occupying it. We have had this experience. We have had a daily scramble for life; and when I say
we, I include shoals of people. I have the impression that the only people who do not have to scramble are the veterans
— the disciples who have been here before and know the ropes. I think they arrive about a week before the first opera,
and engage all the tables for the season. My tribe had tried all kinds of places — some outside of the town, a mile or
two — and have captured only nibblings and odds and ends, never in any instance a complete and satisfying meal.
Digestible? No, the reverse. These odds and ends are going to serve as souvenirs of Bayreuth, and in that regard their
value is not to be overestimated. Photographs fade, bric-a-brac gets lost, busts of Wagner get broken, but once you
absorb a Bayreuth-restaurant meal it is your possession and your property until the time comes to embalm the rest of
you. Some of these pilgrims here become, in effect, cabinets; cabinets of souvenirs of Bayreuth. It is believed among
scientists that you could examine the crop of a dead Bayreuth pilgrim anywhere in the earth and tell where he came
from. But I like this ballast. I think a “Hermitage” scrap-up at eight in the evening, when all the famine-breeders
have been there and laid in their mementoes and gone, is the quietest thing you can lay on your keelson except
gravel.

THURSDAY. — They keep two teams of singers in stock for the chief roles, and one of these is composed of the most
renowned artists in the world, with Materna and Alvary in the lead. I suppose a double team is necessary; doubtless a
single team would die of exhaustion in a week, for all the plays last from four in the afternoon till ten at night.
Nearly all the labor falls upon the half-dozen head singers, and apparently they are required to furnish all the noise
they can for the money. If they feel a soft, whispery, mysterious feeling they are required to open out and let the
public know it. Operas are given only on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, with three days of ostensible
rest per week, and two teams to do the four operas; but the ostensible rest is devoted largely to rehearsing. It is
said that the off days are devoted to rehearsing from some time in the morning till ten at night. Are there two
orchestras also? It is quite likely, since there are one hundred and ten names in the orchestra list.

Yesterday the opera was “Tristan and Isolde.” I have seen all sorts of audiences — at theaters, operas, concerts,
lectures, sermons, funerals — but none which was twin to the Wagner audience of Bayreuth for fixed and reverential
attention. Absolute attention and petrified retention to the end of an act of the attitude assumed at the beginning of
it. You detect no movement in the solid mass of heads and shoulders. You seem to sit with the dead in the gloom of a
tomb. You know that they are being stirred to their profoundest depths; that there are times when they want to rise and
wave handkerchiefs and shout their approbation, and times when tears are running down their faces, and it would be a
relief to free their pent emotions in sobs or screams; yet you hear not one utterance till the curtain swings together
and the closing strains have slowly faded out and died; then the dead rise with one impulse and shake the building with
their applause. Every seat is full in the first act; there is not a vacant one in the last. If a man would be
conspicuous, let him come here and retire from the house in the midst of an act. It would make him celebrated.

This audience reminds me of nothing I have ever seen and of nothing I have read about except the city in the Arabian
tale where all the inhabitants have been turned to brass and the traveler finds them after centuries mute, motionless,
and still retaining the attitudes which they last knew in life. Here the Wagner audience dress as they please, and sit
in the dark and worship in silence. At the Metropolitan in New York they sit in a glare, and wear their showiest
harness; they hum airs, they squeak fans, they titter, and they gabble all the time. In some of the boxes the
conversation and laughter are so loud as to divide the attention of the house with the stage. In large measure the
Metropolitan is a show-case for rich fashionables who are not trained in Wagnerian music and have no reverence for it,
but who like to promote art and show their clothes.

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its
creator is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his brain and hands consecrated things, and the partaking of
them with eye and ear a sacred solemnity? Manifestly, no. Then, perhaps the temporary expatriation, the tedious
traversing of seas and continents, the pilgrimage to Bayreuth stands explained. These devotees would worship in an
atmosphere of devotion. It is only here that they can find it without fleck or blemish or any worldly pollution. In
this remote village there are no sights to see, there is no newspaper to intrude the worries of the distant world,
there is nothing going on, it is always Sunday. The pilgrim wends to his temple out of town, sits out his moving
service, returns to his bed with his heart and soul and his body exhausted by long hours of tremendous emotion, and he
is in no fit condition to do anything but to lie torpid and slowly gather back life and strength for the next service.
This opera of “Tristan and Isolde” last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of
some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here.
Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all
others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in
heaven.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my
life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this
devotion.

FRIDAY. — Yesterday’s opera was “Parsifal” again. The others went and they show marked advance in appreciation; but
I went hunting for relics and reminders of the Margravine Wilhelmina, she of the imperishable “Memoirs.” I am properly
grateful to her for her (unconscious) satire upon monarchy and nobility, and therefore nothing which her hand touched
or her eye looked upon is indifferent to me. I am her pilgrim; the rest of this multitude here are Wagner’s.

TUESDAY. — I have seen my last two operas; my season is ended, and we cross over into Bohemia this afternoon. I was
supposing that my musical regeneration was accomplished and perfected, because I enjoyed both of these operas, singing
and all, and, moreover, one of them was “Parsifal,” but the experts have disenchanted me. They say:

“Singing! That wasn’t singing; that was the wailing, screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the
interest of economy.”

Well, I ought to have recognized the sign — the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art. Whenever
I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to
pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo. However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I
was the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those two operas.

William Dean Howells

Is it true that the sun of a man’s mentality touches noon at forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor
Osler is charged with saying so. Maybe he said it, maybe he didn’t; I don’t know which it is. But if he said it, I can
point him to a case which proves his rule. Proves it by being an exception to it. To this place I nominate Mr.
Howells.

I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago. I compare it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of
HARPER, and I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment. For forty years his English has been to me a
continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities — clearness, compression,
verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing — he is, in my belief, without his peer
in the English-writing world. SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit
those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of
veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells’s moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights.

In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find
that elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have to put up with approximations, more or less
frequently; he has better luck. To me, the others are miners working with the gold-pan — of necessity some of the gold
washes over and escapes; whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle — no grain of the metal stands
much chance of eluding him. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain; a close
approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome
it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those
intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically
prompt: it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the
autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry. One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the
automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate. There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals largely
in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word would dismiss the
rain, then you would see it better. It doesn’t rain when Howells is at work.

And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its
architectural felicities of construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that?
Born to him, no doubt. All in shining good order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as
extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and use. He passed his fortieth year long and long
ago; but I think his English of today — his perfect English, I wish to say — can throw down the glove before his
English of that antique time and not be afraid.

I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to examine this passage from it which I append.
I do not mean examine it in a bird’s-eye way; I mean search it, study it. And, of course, read it aloud. I may be
wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it
mutely:

Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must
not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest,
as none but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily
transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie. The Machiavelli whom he
depicts does not cease to be politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds up an atrocious despot
like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers. What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which
there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the
scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the
savior of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always looking for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he
honored the diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he extolled the strong man who destroys liberty
in creating order. But Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still Machiavelli’s hard
fate to be so trammeled in his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human
nature.

You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses, clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and — so
far as you or I can make out — unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable, how unconfused by cross-currents,
eddies, undertows; how seemingly unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley; and how compressed, how
compact, without a complacency-signal hung out anywhere to call attention to it.

There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading it several times aloud, one perceives that a good
deal of matter is crowded into that small space. I think it is a model of compactness. When I take its materials apart
and work them over and put them together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the result back into the same hole, there not
being room enough. I find it a case of a woman packing a man’s trunk: he can get the things out, but he can’t ever get
them back again.

The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest of the article is as compact as it is; there are no
waste words. The sample is just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and rhythmical as it is, it holds no
superiority in these respects over the rest of the essay. Also, the choice phrasing noticeable in the sample is not
lonely; there is a plenty of its kin distributed through the other paragraphs. This is claiming much when that kin must
face the challenge of a phrase like the one in the middle sentence: “an idealist immersed in realities who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie.” With a hundred
words to do it with, the literary artisan could catch that airy thought and tie it down and reduce it to a concrete
condition, visible, substantial, understandable and all right, like a cabbage; but the artist does it with twenty, and
the result is a flower.

The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come from the same source, has the quality of certain scraps of
verse which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not understand why, at first: all the words being the right
words, none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous, therefore we wonder what it is about them that
makes their message take hold.

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom,

And the names he loved to hear

Have been carved for many a year

On the tomb.

It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp notes in it. The words are all “right” words, and all the
same size. We do not notice it at first. We get the effect, it goes straight home to us, but we do not know why. It is
when the right words are conspicuous that they thunder:

The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome!

When I got back from Howells old to Howells young I find him arranging and clustering English words well, but not
any better than now. He is not more felicitous in concreting abstractions now than he was in translating, then, the
visions of the eyes of flesh into words that reproduced their forms and colors:

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of
half-naked FACCHINI; and now in St. Mark’s Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the
shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow
continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and encountered looked like that
weary kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty crest of the
bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But
looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the
shifting threads of the snowfall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around the structure that always seemed
to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be anything but the creation of magic. The tender snow had
compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it
looked as if just from the hand of the builder — or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was
marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the facade, and all that gracious harmony into
which the temple rises, or marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a
hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden
gloves that tremble like peacocks-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints
in ermine; and it danced over all its works, as if exulting in its beauty — beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish
yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think
that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snowfall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so
grim as his wont is, and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so gentle and mild he looked by
the tender light of the storm. The towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors
in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and
out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest
city in the world.

The spirit of Venice is there: of a city where Age and Decay, fagged with distributing damage and repulsiveness
among the other cities of the planet in accordance with the policy and business of their profession, come for rest and
play between seasons, and treat themselves to the luxury and relaxation of sinking the shop and inventing and
squandering charms all about, instead of abolishing such as they find, as it their habit when not on vacation.

In the working season they do business in Boston sometimes, and a character in THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY takes
accurate note of pathetic effects wrought by them upon the aspects of a street of once dignified and elegant homes
whose occupants have moved away and left them a prey to neglect and gradual ruin and progressive degradation; a descent
which reaches bottom at last, when the street becomes a roost for humble professionals of the faith-cure and
fortune-telling sort.

What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I don’t think I was ever in a street before when
quite so many professional ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs. on their door-plates. And the poor
old place has such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by, and
button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt on — so to speak. I don’t know what’s the
reason, but these material tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly; a tipsy woman isn’t dreadfuler than a haggard
old house, that’s once been a home, in a street like this.

Mr. Howells’s pictures are not mere stiff, hard, accurate photographs; they are photographs with feeling in them,
and sentiment, photographs taken in a dream, one might say.

As concerns his humor, I will not try to say anything, yet I would try, if I had the words that might approximately
reach up to its high place. I do not think any one else can play with humorous fancies so gracefully and delicately and
deliciously as he does, nor has so many to play with, nor can come so near making them look as if they were doing the
playing themselves and he was not aware that they were at it. For they are unobtrusive, and quiet in their ways, and
well conducted. His is a humor which flows softly all around about and over and through the mesh of the page,
pervasive, refreshing, health-giving, and makes no more show and no more noise than does the circulation of the
blood.

There is another thing which is contentingly noticeable in Mr. Howells’s books. That is his “stage directions” —
those artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a conversation, and help
the reader to see the one and get at meanings in the other which might not be perceived if entrusted unexplained to the
bare words of the talk. Some authors overdo the stage directions, they elaborate them quite beyond necessity; they
spend so much time and take up so much room in telling us how a person said a thing and how he looked and acted when he
said it that we get tired and vexed and wish he hadn’t said it all. Other authors’ directions are brief enough, but it
is seldom that the brevity contains either wit or information. Writers of this school go in rags, in the matter of
state directions; the majority of them having nothing in stock but a cigar, a laugh, a blush, and a bursting into
tears. In their poverty they work these sorry things to the bone. They say:

“ . . . responded Richard, with a laugh.” (There was nothing to laugh about; there never is. The writer
puts it in from habit — automatically; he is paying no attention to his work; or he would see that there is nothing to
laugh at; often, when a remark is unusually and poignantly flat and silly, he tries to deceive the reader by enlarging
the stage direction and making Richard break into “frenzies of uncontrollable laughter.” This makes the reader
sad.)

“ . . . murmured Gladys, blushing.” (This poor old shop-worn blush is a tiresome thing. We get so we would
rather Gladys would fall out of the book and break her neck than do it again. She is always doing it, and usually
irrelevantly. Whenever it is her turn to murmur she hangs out her blush; it is the only thing she’s got. In a little
while we hate her, just as we do Richard.)

“ . . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears.” (This kind keep a book damp all the time. They can’t say a
thing without crying. They cry so much about nothing that by and by when they have something to cry ABOUT they have
gone dry; they sob, and fetch nothing; we are not moved. We are only glad.)

They gavel me, these stale and overworked stage directions, these carbon films that got burnt out long ago and
cannot now carry any faintest thread of light. It would be well if they could be relieved from duty and flung out in
the literary back yard to rot and disappear along with the discarded and forgotten “steeds” and “halidomes” and similar
stage-properties once so dear to our grandfathers. But I am friendly to Mr. Howells’s stage directions; more friendly
to them than to any one else’s, I think. They are done with a competent and discriminating art, and are faithful to the
requirements of a state direction’s proper and lawful office, which is to inform. Sometimes they convey a scene and its
conditions so well that I believe I could see the scene and get the spirit and meaning of the accompanying dialogue if
some one would read merely the stage directions to me and leave out the talk. For instance, a scene like this, from THE
UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY:

“ . . . and she laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on her father’s shoulder.”

“ . . . but her voice died wearily away, and she stood looking into his face with puzzled entreaty.”

Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to; he can invent fresh ones without limit. It is mainly
the repetition over and over again, by the third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their
novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I think. We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we
turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of them and wish they would do other things for a
change.

“ . . . replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar.”

“ . . . responded Richard, with a laugh.”

“ . . . murmured Gladys, blushing.”

“ . . . repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears.”

“ . . . replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar.”

“ . . . responded the undertaker, with a laugh.”

“ . . . murmured the chambermaid, blushing.”

“ . . . repeated the burglar, bursting into tears.”

“ . . . replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar.”

“ . . . responded Arkwright, with a laugh.”

“ . . . murmured the chief of police, blushing.”

“ . . . repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears.”

And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice stage directions, because they fret me and
keep me trying to get out of their way, just as the automobiles do. At first; then by and by they become monotonous and
I get run over.

Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as the make of it. I have held him in
admiration and affection so many years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but his heart
isn’t, nor his pen; and years do not count. Let him have plenty of them; there is profit in them for us.

English as she is Taught

In the appendix to Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson one finds this anecdote:

CATO’S SOLILOQUY. — One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat to him (Dr. Samuel Johnson) Cato’s Soliloquy,
which she went through very correctly. The Doctor, after a pause, asked the child:

“What was to bring Cato to an end?”

She said it was a knife.

“No, my dear, it was not so.”

“My aunt Polly said it was a knife.”

“Why, Aunt Polly’s knife MAY DO, but it was a DAGGER, my dear.”

He then asked her the meaning of “bane and antidote,” which she was unable to give. Mrs. Gastrel said:

“You cannot expect so young a child to know the meaning of such words.”

He then said:

“My dear, how many pence are there in SIXPENCE?”

“I cannot tell, sir,” was the half-terrified reply.

On this, addressing himself to Mrs. Gastrel, he said:

“Now, my dear lady, can anything be more ridiculous than to teach a child Cato’s Soliloquy, who does not know how
many pence there are in a sixpence?”

In a lecture before the Royal Geographical Society Professor Ravenstein quoted the following list of frantic
questions, and said that they had been asked in an examination:

Mention all names of places in the world derived from Julius Caesar or Augustus Caesar.

Where are the following rivers: Pisuerga, Sakaria, Guadalete, Jalon, Mulde?

Name the length and breadth of the streams of lava which issued from the Skaptar Jokul in the eruption of 1783.

That list would oversize nearly anybody’s geographical knowledge. Isn’t it reasonably possible that in our schools
many of the questions in all studies are several miles ahead of where the pupil is? — that he is set to struggle with
things that are ludicrously beyond his present reach, hopelessly beyond his present strength? This remark in passing,
and by way of text; now I come to what I was going to say.

I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity. It is a little book, a manuscript compilation, and the
compiler sent it to me with the request that I say whether I think it ought to be published or not. I said, Yes; but as
I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious; and so, now that the publication is imminent, it has seemed to me that I
should feel more comfortable if I could divide up this responsibility with the public by adding them to the court.
Therefore I will print some extracts from the book, in the hope that they may make converts to my judgment that the
volume has merit which entitles it to publication.

As to its character. Every one has sampled “English as She is Spoke” and “English as She is Wrote”; this little
volume furnishes us an instructive array of examples of “English as She is Taught” — in the public schools of — well,
this country. The collection is made by a teacher in those schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none of
them have been tampered with, or doctored in any way. From time to time, during several years, whenever a pupil has
delivered himself of anything peculiarly quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this teacher and her
associates have privately set that thing down in a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to grammar,
construction, spelling, and all; and the result is this literary curiosity.

You perceive that the poor little young idea has taken a shot at a good many kinds of game in the course of the
book. Now as to results. Here are some quaint definitions of words. It will be noticed that in all of these instances
the sound of the word, or the look of it on paper, has misled the child:

ABORIGINES, a system of mountains.

ALIAS, a good man in the Bible.

AMENABLE, anything that is mean.

AMMONIA, the food of the gods.

ASSIDUITY, state of being an acid.

AURIFEROUS, pertaining to an orifice.

CAPILLARY, a little caterpillar.

CORNIFEROUS, rocks in which fossil corn is found.

EMOLUMENT, a headstone to a grave.

EQUESTRIAN, one who asks questions.

EUCHARIST, one who plays euchre.

FRANCHISE, anything belonging to the French.

IDOLATER, a very idle person.

IPECAC, a man who likes a good dinner.

IRRIGATE, to make fun of.

MENDACIOUS, what can be mended.

MERCENARY, one who feels for another.

PARASITE, a kind of umbrella.

PARASITE, the murder of an infant.

PUBLICAN, a man who does his prayers in public.

TENACIOUS, ten acres of land.

Here is one where the phrase “publicans and sinners” has got mixed up in the child’s mind with politics, and the
result is a definition which takes one in a sudden and unexpected way:

REPUBLICAN, a sinner mentioned in the Bible.

Also in Democratic newspapers now and then. Here are two where the mistake has resulted from sound assisted by
remote fact:

PLAGIARIST, a writer of plays.

DEMAGOGUE, a vessel containing beer and other liquids.

I cannot quite make out what it was that misled the pupil in the following instances; it would not seem to have been
the sound of the word, nor the look of it in print:

ASPHYXIA, a grumbling, fussy temper.

QUARTERNIONS, a bird with a flat beak and no bill, living in New Zealand.

QUARTERNIONS, the name given to a style of art practiced by the Phoenicians.

QUARTERNIONS, a religious convention held every hundred years.

SIBILANT, the state of being idiotic.

CROSIER, a staff carried by the Deity.

In the following sentences the pupil’s ear has been deceiving him again:

The marriage was illegible.

He was totally dismasted with the whole performance.

He enjoys riding on a philosopher.

She was very quick at repertoire.

He prayed for the waters to subsidize.

The leopard is watching his sheep.

They had a strawberry vestibule.

Here is one which — well, now, how often we do slam right into the truth without ever suspecting it:

The men employed by the Gas Company go around and speculate the meter.

Indeed they do, dear; and when you grow up, many and many’s the time you will notice it in the gas bill. In the
following sentences the little people have some information to convey, every time; but in my case they fail to connect:
the light always went out on the keystone word:

The coercion of some things is remarkable; as bread and molasses.

Her hat is contiguous because she wears it on one side.

He preached to an egregious congregation.

The captain eliminated a bullet through the man’s heart.

You should take caution and be precarious.

The supercilious girl acted with vicissitude when the perennial time came.

The last is a curiously plausible sentence; one seems to know what it means, and yet he knows all the time that he
doesn’t. Here is an odd (but entirely proper) use of a word, and a most sudden descent from a lofty philosophical
altitude to a very practical and homely illustration:

We should endeavor to avoid extremes — like those of wasps and bees.

And here — with “zoological” and “geological” in his mind, but not ready to his tongue — the small scholar has
innocently gone and let out a couple of secrets which ought never to have been divulged in any circumstances:

There are a good many donkeys in theological gardens.

Some of the best fossils are found in theological gardens.

Under the head of “Grammar” the little scholars furnish the following information:

Gender is the distinguishing nouns without regard to sex.

A verb is something to eat.

Adverbs should always be used as adjectives and adjectives as adverbs.

Every sentence and name of God must begin with a caterpillar.

“Caterpillar” is well enough, but capital letter would have been stricter. The following is a brave attempt at a
solution, but it failed to liquify:

When they are going to say some prose or poetry before they say the poetry or prose they must put a semicolon just
after the introduction of the prose or poetry.

The chapter on “Mathematics” is full of fruit. From it I take a few samples — mainly in an unripe state:

A straight line is any distance between two places.

Parallel lines are lines that can never meet until they run together.

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

Things which are equal to each other are equal to anything else.

To find the number of square feet in a room you multiply the room by the number of the feet. The product is the
result.

Right you are. In the matter of geography this little book is unspeakably rich. The questions do not appear to have
applied the microscope to the subject, as did those quoted by Professor Ravenstein; still, they proved plenty difficult
enough without that. These pupils did not hunt with a microscope, they hunted with a shot-gun; this is shown by the
crippled condition of the game they brought in:

America is divided into the Passiffic slope and the Mississippi valey.

North America is separated by Spain.

America consists from north to south about five hundred miles.

The United States is quite a small country compared with some other countrys, but it about as industrious.

The capital of the United States is Long Island.

The five seaports of the U.S. are Newfunlan and Sanfrancisco.

The principal products of the U.S. is earthquakes and volcanoes.

The Alaginnies are mountains in Philadelphia.

The Rocky Mountains are on the western side of Philadelphia.

Cape Hateras is a vast body of water surrounded by land and flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.

Mason and Dixon’s line is the Equator.

One of the leading industries of the United States is mollasses, book-covers, numbers, gas, teaching, lumber,
manufacturers, paper-making, publishers, coal.

In Austria the principal occupation is gathering Austrich feathers.

Gibraltar is an island built on a rock.

Russia is very cold and tyrannical.

Sicily is one of the Sandwich Islands.

Hindoostan flows through the Ganges and empties into the Mediterranean Sea.

Ireland is called the Emigrant Isle because it is so beautiful and green.

The width of the different zones Europe lies in depend upon the surrounding country.

The imports of a country are the things that are paid for, the exports are the things that are not.

Climate lasts all the time and weather only a few days.

The two most famous volcanoes of Europe are Sodom and Gomorrah.

The chapter headed “Analysis” shows us that the pupils in our public schools are not merely loaded up with those
showy facts about geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state; no, there’s machinery for
clarifying and expanding their minds. They are required to take poems and analyze them, dig out their common sense,
reduce them to statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous prose translation which shall tell you at a glance what the
poet was trying to get at. One sample will do. Here is a stanza from “The Lady of the Lake,” followed by the pupil’s
impressive explanation of it:

Alone, but with unbated zeal, The horseman plied with scourge and steel; For jaded now and spent with toil, Embossed
with foam and dark with soil, While every gasp with sobs he drew, The laboring stag strained full in view.

The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument made of steel alone with strong ardor not
diminishing, for, being tired from the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and ignorant with weariness,
while every breath for labor he drew with cries full or sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard filtered
in sight.

I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I have had glimpses of its meaning, it moments when I was not
as ignorant with weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea of it ever filtered in sight.
If I were a public-school pupil I would put those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it is the
thing to spread your mind.

We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say. As one turns the pages he is impressed with
the depth to which one date has been driven into the American child’s head — 1492. The date is there, and it is there
to stay. And it is always at hand, always deliverable at a moment’s notice. But the Fact that belongs with it? That is
quite another matter. Only the date itself is familiar and sure: its vast Fact has failed of lodgment. It would appear
that whenever you ask a public-school pupil when a thing — anything, no matter what — happened, and he is in doubt, he
always rips out his 1492. He applies it to everything, from the landing of the ark to the introduction of the
horse-car. Well, after all, it is our first date, and so it is right enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to
teach our children to honor it:

George Washington was born in 1492.

Washington wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1492.

St. Bartholemew was massacred in 1492.

The Brittains were the Saxons who entered England in 1492 under Julius Caesar.

The earth is 1492 miles in circumference.

To proceed with “History”

Christopher Columbus was called the Father of his Country.

Queen Isabella of Spain sold her watch and chain and other millinery so that Columbus could discover America.

The Indian wars were very desecrating to the country.

The Indians pursued their warfare by hiding in the bushes and then scalping them.

Captain John Smith has been styled the father of his country. His life was saved by his daughter Pochahantas.

The Puritans found an insane asylum in the wilds of America.

The Stamp Act was to make everybody stamp all materials so they should be null and void.

Washington died in Spain almost broken-hearted. His remains were taken to the cathedral in Havana.

Gorilla warfare was where men rode on gorillas.

John Brown was a very good insane man who tried to get fugitives slaves into Virginia. He captured all the
inhabitants, but was finally conquered and condemned to his death. The confederasy was formed by the fugitive
slaves.

Alfred the Great reigned 872 years. He was distinguished for letting some buckwheat cakes burn, and the lady scolded
him.

Henry Eight was famous for being a great widower haveing lost several wives.

Lady Jane Grey studied Greek and Latin and was beheaded after a few days.

John Bright is noted for an incurable disease.

Lord James Gordon Bennet instigated the Gordon Riots.

The Middle Ages come in between antiquity and posterity.

Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years ago. His birthday was November 1883. He was
once a Pope. He lived at the time of the Rebellion of Worms.

Julius Caesar is noted for his famous telegram dispatch I came I saw I conquered.

Julius Caesar was really a very great man. He was a very great soldier and wrote a book for beginners in the
Latin.

Cleopatra was caused by the death of an asp which she dissolved in a wine cup.

The only form of government in Greece was a limited monkey.

The Persian war lasted about 500 years.

Greece had only 7 wise men.

Socrates . . . destroyed some statues and had to drink Shamrock.

Here is a fact correctly stated; and yet it is phrased with such ingenious infelicity that it can be depended upon
to convey misinformation every time it is uncarefully unread:

By the Salic law no woman or descendant of a woman could occupy the throne.

To show how far a child can travel in history with judicious and diligent boosting in the public school, we select
the following mosaic:

Abraham Lincoln was born in Wales in 1599.

In the chapter headed “Intellectual” I find a great number of most interesting statements. A sample or two may be
found not amiss:

Bracebridge Hall was written by Henry Irving.

Show Bound was written by Peter Cooper.

The House of the Seven Gables was written by Lord Bryant.

Edgar A. Poe was a very curdling writer.

Cotton Mather was a writer who invented the cotten gin and wrote histories.

Beowulf wrote the Scriptures.

Ben Johnson survived Shakspeare in some respects.

In the Canterbury Tale it gives account of King Alfred on his way to the shrine of Thomas Bucket.

Chaucer was the father of English pottery.

Chaucer was a bland verse writer of the third century.

Chaucer was succeeded by H. Wads. Longfellow an American Writer. His writings were chiefly prose and nearly one
hundred years elapsed.

Shakspere translated the Scriptures and it was called St. James because he did it.

In the middle of the chapter I find many pages of information concerning Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s works, and
those of Bacon, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Smollett, De Foe, Locke, Pope, Swift, Goldsmith,
Burns, Cowper, Wordsworth, Gibbon, Byron, Coleridge, Hood, Scott, Macaulay, George Eliot, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray,
Browning, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, and Disraeli — a fact which shows that into the restricted stomach of the
public-school pupil is shoveled every year the blood, bone, and viscera of a gigantic literature, and the same is there
digested and disposed of in a most successful and characteristic and gratifying public-school way. I have space for but
a trifling few of the results:

Lord Byron was the son of an heiress and a drunken man.

Wm. Wordsworth wrote the Barefoot Boy and Imitations on Immortality.

Gibbon wrote a history of his travels in Italy. This was original.

George Eliot left a wife and children who mourned greatly for his genius.

George Eliot Miss Mary Evans Mrs. Cross Mrs. Lewis was the greatest female poet unless George Sands is made an
exception of.

Bulwell is considered a good writer.

Sir Walter Scott Charles Bronte Alfred the Great and Johnson were the first great novelists.

Thomas Babington Makorlay graduated at Harvard and then studied law, he was raised to the peerage as baron in 1557
and died in 1776.

Here are two or three miscellaneous facts that may be of value, if taken in moderation:

Homer’s writings are Homer’s Essays Virgil the Aenid and Paradise lost some people say that these poems were not
written by Homer but by another man of the same name.

A sort of sadness kind of shone in Bryant’s poems.

Holmes is a very profligate and amusing writer.

When the public-school pupil wrestles with the political features of the Great Republic, they throw him
sometimes:

A bill becomes a law when the President vetoes it.

The three departments of the government is the President rules the world, the governor rules the State, the mayor
rules the city.

The first conscientious Congress met in Philadelphia.

The Constitution of the United States was established to ensure domestic hostility.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again. As follows:

The Constitution of the United States is that part of the book at the end which nobody reads.

And here she rises once more and untimely. There should be a limit to public-school instruction; it cannot be wise
or well to let the young find out everything:

Congress is divided into civilized half civilized and savage.

Here are some results of study in music and oratory:

An interval in music is the distance on the keyboard from one piano to the next.

A rest means you are not to sing it.

Emphasis is putting more distress on one word than another.

The chapter on “Physiology” contains much that ought not to be lost to science:

Physillogigy is to study about your bones stummick and vertebry.

Occupations which are injurious to health are cabolic acid gas which is impure blood.

We have an upper and lower skin. The lower skin moves all the time and the upper skin moves when we do.

The body is mostly composed of water and about one half is avaricious tissue.

The stomach is a small pear-shaped bone situated in the body.

The gastric juice keeps the bones from creaking.

The Chyle flows up the middle of the backbone and reaches the heart where it meets the oxygen and is purified.

The salivary glands are used to salivate the body.

In the stomach starch is changed to cane sugar and cane sugar to sugar cane.

The olfactory nerve enters the cavity of the orbit and is developed into the special sense of hearing.

The growth of a tooth begins in the back of the mouth and extends to the stomach.

If we were on a railroad track and a train was coming the train would deafen our ears so that we couldn’t see to get
off the track.

If, up to this point, none of my quotations have added flavor to the Johnsonian anecdote at the head of this
article, let us make another attempt:

The theory that intuitive truths are discovered by the light of nature originated from St. John’s interpretation of
a passage in the Gospel of Plato.

The weight of the earth is found by comparing a mass of known lead with that of a mass of unknown lead.

To find the weight of the earth take the length of a degree on a meridian and multiply by 6 1/2 pounds.

The spheres are to each other as the squares of their homologous sides.

A body will go just as far in the first second as the body will go plus the force of gravity and that’s equal to
twice what the body will go.

Specific gravity is the weight to be compared weight of an equal volume of or that is the weight of a body compared
with the weight of an equal volume.

The law of fluid pressure divide the different forms of organized bodies by the form of attraction and the number
increased will be the form.

Inertia is that property of bodies by virtue of which it cannot change its own condition of rest or motion. In other
words it is the negative quality of passiveness either in recoverable latency or insipient latescence.

If a laugh is fair here, not the struggling child, nor the unintelligent teacher — or rather the unintelligent
Boards, Committees, and Trustees — are the proper target for it. All through this little book one detects the signs of
a certain probable fact — that a large part of the pupil’s “instruction” consists in cramming him with obscure and
wordy “rules” which he does not understand and has no time to understand. It would be as useful to cram him with
brickbats; they would at least stay. In a town in the interior of New York, a few years ago, a gentleman set forth a
mathematical problem and proposed to give a prize to every public-school pupil who should furnish the correct solution
of it. Twenty-two of the brightest boys in the public schools entered the contest. The problem was not a very difficult
one for pupils of their mathematical rank and standing, yet they all failed — by a hair — through one trifling mistake
or another. Some searching questions were asked, when it turned out that these lads were as glib as parrots with the
“rules,” but could not reason out a single rule or explain the principle underlying it. Their memories had been
stocked, but not their understandings. It was a case of brickbat culture, pure and simple.

There are several curious “compositions” in the little book, and we must make room for one. It is full of naivete,
brutal truth, and unembarrassed directness, and is the funniest (genuine) boy’s composition I think I have ever
seen:

On Girls

Girls are very stuck up and dignefied in their maner and be have your. They think more of dress than anything and
like to play with dowls and rags. They cry if they see a cow in a far distance and are afraid of guns. They stay at
home all the time and go to church on Sunday. They are al-ways sick. They are always funy and making fun of boy’s hands
and they say how dirty. They cant play marbels. I pity them poor things. They make fun of boys and then turn round and
love them. I dont beleave they ever kiled a cat or anything. They look out every nite and say oh ant the moon lovely.
Thir is one thing I have not told and that is they al-ways now their lessons bettern boys.

From Mr. Edward Channing’s recent article in SCIENCE:

The marked difference between the books now being produced by French, English, and American travelers, on the one
hand, and German explorers, on the other, is too great to escape attention. That difference is due entirely to the fact
that in school and university the German is taught, in the first place to see, and in the second place to understand
what he does see.

A Simplified Alphabet

(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about the last writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal
subject.)

I have had a kindly feeling, a friendly feeling, a cousinly feeling toward Simplified Spelling, from the beginning
of the movement three years ago, but nothing more inflamed than that. It seemed to me to merely propose to substitute
one inadequacy for another; a sort of patching and plugging poor old dental relics with cement and gold and porcelain
paste; what was really needed was a new set of teeth. That is to say, a new ALPHABET.

The heart of our trouble is with our foolish alphabet. It doesn’t know how to spell, and can’t be taught. In this it
is like all other alphabets except one — the phonographic. This is the only competent alphabet in the world. It can
spell and correctly pronounce any word in our language.

That admirable alphabet, that brilliant alphabet, that inspired alphabet, can be learned in an hour or two. In a
week the student can learn to write it with some little facility, and to read it with considerable ease. I know, for I
saw it tried in a public school in Nevada forty-five years ago, and was so impressed by the incident that it has
remained in my memory ever since.

I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written (and printed) character. I mean SIMPLY the alphabet; simply
the consonants and the vowels — I don’t mean any REDUCTIONS or abbreviations of them, such as the shorthand writer uses
in order to get compression and speed. No, I would SPELL EVERY WORD OUT.

I will insert the alphabet here as I find it in Burnz’s PHONIC SHORTHAND. (Figure 1) It is arranged on the basis of
Isaac Pitman’s PHONOGRAPHY. Isaac Pitman was the originator and father of scientific phonography. It is used throughout
the globe. It was a memorable invention. He made it public seventy-three years ago. The firm of Isaac Pitman &
Sons, New York, still exists, and they continue the master’s work.

What should we gain?

First of all, we could spell DEFINITELY— and correctly — any word you please, just by the SOUND of it. We can’t do
that with our present alphabet. For instance, take a simple, every-day word PHTHISIS. If we tried to spell it by the
sound of it, we should make it TYSIS, and be laughed at by every educated person.

Secondly, we should gain in REDUCTION OF LABOR in writing.

Simplified Spelling makes valuable reductions in the case of several hundred words, but the new spelling must be
LEARNED. You can’t spell them by the sound; you must get them out of the book.

But even if we knew the simplified form for every word in the language, the phonographic alphabet would still beat
the Simplified Speller “hands down” in the important matter of economy of labor. I will illustrate:

PRESENT FORM: through, laugh, highland.

SIMPLIFIED FORM: thru, laff, hyland.

PHONOGRAPHIC FORM: (Figure 2)

To write the word “through,” the pen has to make twenty-one strokes.

To write the word “thru,” then pen has to make twelve strokes — a good saving.

To write that same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only THREE strokes.

To write the word “laugh,” the pen has to make FOURTEEN strokes.

To write “laff,” the pen has to make the SAME NUMBER of strokes — no labor is saved to the penman.

To write the same word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only THREE strokes.

To write the word “highland,” the pen has to make twenty-two strokes.

To write “hyland,” the pen has to make eighteen strokes.

To write that word with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only FIVE strokes. (Figure 3)

To write the words “phonographic alphabet,” the pen has to make fifty-three strokes.

To write “fonografic alfabet,” the pen has to make fifty strokes. To the penman, the saving in labor is
insignificant.

To write that word (with vowels) with the phonographic alphabet, the pen has to make only SEVENTEEN strokes.

Without the vowels, only THIRTEEN strokes. (Figure 4) The vowels are hardly necessary, this time.

We make five pen-strokes in writing an m. Thus: (Figure 5) a stroke down; a stroke up; a second stroke down; a
second stroke up; a final stroke down. Total, five. The phonographic alphabet accomplishes the m with a single stroke —
a curve, like a parenthesis that has come home drunk and has fallen face down right at the front door where everybody
that goes along will see him and say, Alas!

When our written m is not the end of a word, but is otherwise located, it has to be connected with the next letter,
and that requires another pen-stroke, making six in all, before you get rid of that m. But never mind about the
connecting strokes — let them go. Without counting them, the twenty-six letters of our alphabet consumed about eighty
pen-strokes for their construction — about three pen-strokes per letter.

It is THREE TIMES THE NUMBER required by the phonographic alphabet. It requires but ONE stroke for each letter.

My writing-gait is — well, I don’t know what it is, but I will time myself and see. Result: it is twenty-four words
per minute. I don’t mean composing; I mean COPYING. There isn’t any definite composing-gait.

Very well, my copying-gait is 1,440 words per hour — say 1,500. If I could use the phonographic character with
facility I could do the 1,500 in twenty minutes. I could do nine hours’ copying in three hours; I could do three years’
copying in one year. Also, if I had a typewriting machine with the phonographic alphabet on it — oh, the miracles I
could do!

I am not pretending to write that character well. I have never had a lesson, and I am copying the letters from the
book. But I can accomplish my desire, at any rate, which is, to make the reader get a good and clear idea of the
advantage it would be to us if we could discard our present alphabet and put this better one in its place — using it in
books, newspapers, with the typewriter, and with the pen.

(Figure 6) — MAN DOG HORSE. I think it is graceful and would look comely in print. And consider — once more, I beg —
what a labor-saver it is! Ten pen-strokes with the one system to convey those three words above, and thirty-three by
the other! (Figure 6) I mean, in SOME ways, not in all. I suppose I might go so far as to say in most ways, and be
within the facts, but never mind; let it go at SOME. One of the ways in which it exercises this birthright is — as I
think — continuing to use our laughable alphabet these seventy-three years while there was a rational one at hand, to
be had for the taking.

It has taken five hundred years to simplify some of Chaucer’s rotten spelling — if I may be allowed to use to frank
a term as that — and it will take five hundred years more to get our exasperating new Simplified Corruptions accepted
and running smoothly. And we sha’n’t be any better off then than we are now; for in that day we shall still have the
privilege the Simplifiers are exercising now: ANYBODY can change the spelling that wants to.

BUT YOU CAN’T CHANGE THE PHONOGRAPHIC SPELLING; THERE ISN’T ANY WAY. It will always follow the SOUND. If you want to
change the spelling, you have to change the sound first.

Mind, I myself am a Simplified Speller; I belong to that unhappy guild that is patiently and hopefully trying to
reform our drunken old alphabet by reducing his whiskey. Well, it will improve him. When they get through and have
reformed him all they can by their system he will be only HALF drunk. Above that condition their system can never lift
him. There is no competent, and lasting, and real reform for him but to take away his whiskey entirely, and fill up his
jug with Pitman’s wholesome and undiseased alphabet.

One great drawback to Simplified Spelling is, that in print a simplified word looks so like the very nation! and
when you bunch a whole squadron of the Simplified together the spectacle is very nearly unendurable.

The da ma ov koars kum when the publik ma be expektd to get rekonsyled to the bezair asspekt of the Simplified
Kombynashuns, but — if I may be allowed the expression — is it worth the wasted time? (Figure 7)

To see our letters put together in ways to which we are not accustomed offends the eye, and also takes the
EXPRESSION out of the words.

La on, Makduf, and damd be he hoo furst krys hold, enuf!

It doesn’t thrill you as it used to do. The simplifications have sucked the thrill all out of it.

But a written character with which we are NOT ACQUAINTED does not offend us — Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic, and
the others — they have an interesting look, and we see beauty in them, too. And this is true of hieroglyphics, as well.
There is something pleasant and engaging about the mathematical signs when we do not understand them. The mystery
hidden in these things has a fascination for us: we can’t come across a printed page of shorthand without being
impressed by it and wishing we could read it.

Very well, what I am offering for acceptance and adopting is not shorthand, but longhand, written with the SHORTHAND
ALPHABET UNREACHED. You can write three times as many words in a minute with it as you can write with our alphabet. And
so, in a way, it IS properly a shorthand. It has a pleasant look, too; a beguiling look, an inviting look. I will write
something in it, in my rude and untaught way: (Figure 8)

Even when I do it it comes out prettier than it does in Simplified Spelling. Yes, and in the Simplified it
costs one hundred and twenty-three pen-strokes to write it, whereas in the phonographic it costs only twenty-nine.

(Figure 9) is probably (Figure 10).

Let us hope so, anyway.

As Concerns Interpreting the Deity

I

This line of hieroglyphics was for fourteen years the despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of
the Rosetta stone: (Figure 1)

After five years of study Champollion translated it thus:

Therefore let the worship of Epiphanes be maintained in all the temples, this upon pain of death.

That was the twenty-forth translation that had been furnished by scholars. For a time it stood. But only for a time.
Then doubts began to assail it and undermine it, and the scholars resumed their labors. Three years of patient work
produced eleven new translations; among them, this, by Grunfeldt, was received with considerable favor:

The horse of Epiphanes shall be maintained at the public expense; this upon pain of death.

But the following rendering, by Gospodin, was received by the learned world with yet greater favor:

The priest shall explain the wisdom of Epiphanes to all these people, and these shall listen with reverence, upon
pain of death.

Seven years followed, in which twenty-one fresh and widely varying renderings were scored — none of them quite
convincing. But now, at last, came Rawlinson, the youngest of all the scholars, with a translation which was
immediately and universally recognized as being the correct version, and his name became famous in a day. So famous,
indeed, that even the children were familiar with it; and such a noise did the achievement itself make that not even
the noise of the monumental political event of that same year — the flight from Elba — was able to smother it to
silence. Rawlinson’s version reads as follows:

Therefore, walk not away from the wisdom of Epiphanes, but turn and follow it; so shall it conduct thee to the
temple’s peace, and soften for thee the sorrows of life and the pains of death.

Here is another difficult text: (Figure 2)

It is demotic — a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of the language which has perished from the knowledge of all
men twenty-five hundred years before the Christian era.

Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of pictures, upon our crags and boulders. It has taken our most
gifted and painstaking students two centuries to get at the meanings hidden in these pictures; yet there are still two
little lines of hieroglyphics among the figures grouped upon the Dighton Rocks which they have not succeeds in
interpreting to their satisfaction. These: (Figure 3)

The suggested solutions are practically innumerable; they would fill a book.

Thus we have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only when we set out to discover the secret of
God that our difficulties disappear. It was always so. In antique Roman times it was the custom of the Deity to try to
conceal His intentions in the entrails of birds, and this was patiently and hopefully continued century after century,
although the attempted concealment never succeeded, in a single recorded instance. The augurs could read entrails as
easily as a modern child can read coarse print. Roman history is full of the marvels of interpretation which these
extraordinary men performed. These strange and wonderful achievements move our awe and compel our admiration. Those men
could pierce to the marrow of a mystery instantly. If the Rosetta-stone idea had been introduced it would have defeated
them, but entrails had no embarrassments for them. Entrails have gone out, now — entrails and dreams. It was at last
found out that as hiding-places for the divine intentions they were inadequate.

A part of the wall of Valletri in former times been struck with thunder, the response of the soothsayers was, that a
native of that town would some time or other arrive at supreme power. — BOHN’S SUETONIUS, p. 138.

“Some time or other.” It looks indefinite, but no matter, it happened, all the same; one needed only to wait, and be
patient, and keep watch, then he would find out that the thunder-stroke had Caesar Augustus in mind, and had come to
give notice.

There were other advance-advertisements. One of them appeared just before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most
poetic and touching and romantic in its feelings and aspects. It was a dream. It was dreamed by Caesar Augustus’s
mother, and interpreted at the usual rates:

Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched to the stars and expanded through the whole circuit of
heaven and earth. — SUETONIUS, p. 139.

That was in the augur’s line, and furnished him no difficulties, but it would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion
fourteen years to make sure of what it meant, because they would have been surprised and dizzy. It would have been too
late to be valuable, then, and the bill for service would have been barred by the statute of limitation.

In those old Roman days a gentleman’s education was not complete until he had taken a theological course at the
seminary and learned how to translate entrails. Caesar Augustus’s education received this final polish. All through his
life, whenever he had poultry on the menu he saved the interiors and kept himself informed of the Deity’s plans by
exercising upon those interiors the arts of augury.

In his first consulship, while he was observing the auguries, twelve vultures presented themselves, as they had done
to Romulus. And when he offered sacrifice, the livers of all the victims were folded inward in the lower part; a
circumstance which was regarded by those present who had skill in things of that nature, as an indubitable prognostic
of great and wonderful fortune. — SUETONIUS, p. 141.

“Indubitable” is a strong word, but no doubt it was justified, if the livers were really turned that way. In those
days chicken livers were strangely and delicately sensitive to coming events, no matter how far off they might be; and
they could never keep still, but would curl and squirm like that, particularly when vultures came and showed interest
in that approaching great event and in breakfast.

II

We may now skip eleven hundred and thirty or forty years, which brings us down to enlightened Christian times and
the troubled days of King Stephen of England. The augur has had his day and has been long ago forgotten; the priest had
fallen heir to his trade.

King Henry is dead; Stephen, that bold and outrageous person, comes flying over from Normandy to steal the throne
from Henry’s daughter. He accomplished his crime, and Henry of Huntington, a priest of high degree, mourns over it in
his Chronicle. The Archbishop of Canterbury consecrated Stephen: “wherefore the Lord visited the Archbishop with the
same judgment which he had inflicted upon him who struck Jeremiah the great priest: he died with a year.”

Stephen’s was the greater offense, but Stephen could wait; not so the Archbishop, apparently.

The kingdom was a prey to intestine wars; slaughter, fire, and rapine spread ruin throughout the land; cries of
distress, horror, and woe rose in every quarter.

That was the result of Stephen’s crime. These unspeakable conditions continued during nineteen years. Then Stephen
died as comfortably as any man ever did, and was honorably buried. It makes one pity the poor Archbishop, and with that
he, too, could have been let off as leniently. How did Henry of Huntington know that the Archbishop was sent to his
grave by judgment of God for consecrating Stephen? He does not explain. Neither does he explain why Stephen was awarded
a pleasanter death than he was entitled to, while the aged King Henry, his predecessor, who had ruled England
thirty-five years to the people’s strongly worded satisfaction, was condemned to close his life in circumstances most
distinctly unpleasant, inconvenient, and disagreeable. His was probably the most uninspiring funeral that is set down
in history. There is not a detail about it that is attractive. It seems to have been just the funeral for Stephen, and
even at this far-distant day it is matter of just regret that by an indiscretion the wrong man got it.

Whenever God punishes a man, Henry of Huntington knows why it was done, and tells us; and his pen is eloquent with
admiration; but when a man has earned punishment, and escapes, he does not explain. He is evidently puzzled, but he
does not say anything. I think it is often apparent that he is pained by these discrepancies, but loyally tries his
best not to show it. When he cannot praise, he delivers himself of a silence so marked that a suspicious person could
mistake it for suppressed criticism. However, he has plenty of opportunities to feel contented with the way things go —
his book is full of them.

King David of Scotland . . . under color of religion caused his followers to deal most barbarously with
the English. They ripped open women, tossed children on the points of spears, butchered priests at the altars, and,
cutting off the heads from the images on crucifixes, placed them on the bodies of the slain, while in exchange they
fixed on the crucifixes the heads of their victims. Wherever the Scots came, there was the same scene of horror and
cruelty: women shrieking, old men lamenting, amid the groans of the dying and the despair of the living.

But the English got the victory.

Then the chief of the men of Lothian fell, pierced by an arrow, and all his followers were put to flight. For the
Almighty was offended at them and their strength was rent like a cobweb.

Offended at them for what? For committing those fearful butcheries? No, for that was the common custom on both
sides, and not open to criticism. Then was it for doing the butcheries “under cover of religion”? No, that was not it;
religious feeling was often expressed in that fervent way all through those old centuries. The truth is, He was not
offended at “them” at all; He was only offended at their king, who had been false to an oath. Then why did not He put
the punishment upon the king instead of upon “them”? It is a difficult question. One can see by the Chronicle that the
“judgments” fell rather customarily upon the wrong person, but Henry of Huntington does not explain why. Here is one
that went true; the chronicler’s satisfaction in it is not hidden:

In the month of August, Providence displayed its justice in a remarkable manner; for two of the nobles who had
converted monasteries into fortifications, expelling the monks, their sin being the same, met with a similar
punishment. Robert Marmion was one, Godfrey de Mandeville the other. Robert Marmion, issuing forth against the enemy,
was slain under the walls of the monastery, being the only one who fell, though he was surrounded by his troops. Dying
excommunicated, he became subject to death everlasting. In like manner Earl Godfrey was singled out among his
followers, and shot with an arrow by a common foot-soldier. He made light of the wound, but he died of it in a few
days, under excommunication. See here the like judgment of God, memorable through all ages!

The exaltation jars upon me; not because of the death of the men, for they deserved that, but because it is death
eternal, in white-hot fire and flame. It makes my flesh crawl. I have not known more than three men, or perhaps four,
in my whole lifetime, whom I would rejoice to see writhing in those fires for even a year, let alone forever. I believe
I would relent before the year was up, and get them out if I could. I think that in the long run, if a man’s wife and
babies, who had not harmed me, should come crying and pleading, I couldn’t stand it; I know I should forgive him and
let him go, even if he had violated a monastery. Henry of Huntington has been watching Godfrey and Marmion for nearly
seven hundred and fifty years, now, but I couldn’t do it, I know I couldn’t. I am soft and gentle in my nature, and I
should have forgiven them seventy-and-seven times, long ago. And I think God has; but this is only an opinion, and not
authoritative, like Henry of Huntington’s interpretations. I could learn to interpret, but I have never tried; I get so
little time.

All through his book Henry exhibits his familiarity with the intentions of God, and with the reasons for his
intentions. Sometimes — very often, in fact — the act follows the intention after such a wide interval of time that one
wonders how Henry could fit one act out of a hundred to one intention out of a hundred and get the thing right every
time when there was such abundant choice among acts and intentions. Sometimes a man offends the Deity with a crime, and
is punished for it thirty years later; meantime he was committed a million other crimes: no matter, Henry can pick out
the one that brought the worms. Worms were generally used in those days for the slaying of particularly wicked people.
This has gone out, now, but in old times it was a favorite. It always indicated a case of “wrath.” For instance:

. . . the just God avenging Robert Fitzhilderbrand’s perfidy, a worm grew in his vitals, which gradually
gnawing its way through his intestines fattened on the abandoned man till, tortured with excruciating sufferings and
venting himself in bitter moans, he was by a fitting punishment brought to his end. — (P. 400.)

It was probably an alligator, but we cannot tell; we only know it was a particular breed, and only used to convey
wrath. Some authorities think it was an ichthyosaurus, but there is much doubt.

However, one thing we do know; and that is that that worm had been due years and years. Robert F. had violated a
monastery once; he had committed unprintable crimes since, and they had been permitted — under disapproval — but the
ravishment of the monastery had not been forgotten nor forgiven, and the worm came at last.

Why were these reforms put off in this strange way? What was to be gained by it? Did Henry of Huntington really know
his facts, or was he only guessing? Sometimes I am half persuaded that he is only a guesser, and not a good one. The
divine wisdom must surely be of the better quality than he makes it out to be.

Five hundred years before Henry’s time some forecasts of the Lord’s purposes were furnished by a pope, who
perceived, by certain perfectly trustworthy signs furnished by the Deity for the information of His familiars, that the
end of the world was

. . . about to come. But as this end of the world draws near many things are at hand which have not before
happened, as changes in the air, terrible signs in the heavens, tempests out of the common order of the seasons, wars,
famines, pestilences, earthquakes in various places; all which will not happen in our days, but after our days all will
come to pass.

Still, the end was so near that these signs were “sent before that we may be careful for our souls and be found
prepared to meet the impending judgment.”

That was thirteen hundred years ago. This is really no improvement on the work of the Roman augurs.

Concerning Tobacco

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And the chiefest is this — that there is a STANDARD governing the
matter, whereas there is nothing of the kind. Each man’s own preference is the only standard for him, the only one
which he can accept, the only one which can command him. A congress of all the tobacco-lovers in the world could not
elect a standard which would be binding upon you or me, or would even much influence us.

The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own. He hasn’t. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t. He thinks
he can tell what he regards as a good cigar from what he regards as a bad one — but he can’t. He goes by the brand, yet
imagines he goes by the flavor. One may palm off the worst counterfeit upon him; if it bears his brand he will smoke it
contentedly and never suspect.

Children of twenty-five, who have seven years experience, try to tell me what is a good cigar and what isn’t. Me,
who never learned to smoke, but always smoked; me, who came into the world asking for a light.

No one can tell me what is a good cigar — for me. I am the only judge. People who claim to know say that I smoke the
worst cigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they come to my house. They betray an unmanly terror when I
offer them a cigar; they tell lies and hurry away to meet engagements which they have not made when they are threatened
with the hospitalities of my box. Now then, observe what superstition, assisted by a man’s reputation, can do. I was to
have twelve personal friends to supper one night. One of them was as notorious for costly and elegant cigars as I was
for cheap and devilish ones. I called at his house and when no one was looking borrowed a double handful of his very
choicest; cigars which cost him forty cents apiece and bore red-and-gold labels in sign of their nobility. I removed
the labels and put the cigars into a box with my favorite brand on it — a brand which those people all knew, and which
cowed them as men are cowed by an epidemic. They took these cigars when offered at the end of the supper, and lit them
and sternly struggled with them — in dreary silence, for hilarity died when the fell brand came into view and started
around — but their fortitude held for a short time only; then they made excuses and filed out, treading on one
another’s heels with indecent eagerness; and in the morning when I went out to observe results the cigars lay all
between the front door and the gate. All except one — that one lay in the plate of the man from whom I had cabbaged the
lot. One or two whiffs was all he could stand. He told me afterward that some day I would get shot for giving people
that kind of cigars to smoke.

Am I certain of my own standard? Perfectly; yes, absolutely — unless somebody fools me by putting my brand on some
other kind of cigar; for no doubt I am like the rest, and know my cigar by the brand instead of by the flavor. However,
my standard is a pretty wide one and covers a good deal of territory. To me, almost any cigar is good that nobody else
will smoke, and to me almost all cigars are bad that other people consider good. Nearly any cigar will do me, except a
Havana. People think they hurt my feelings when then come to my house with their life preservers on — I mean, with
their own cigars in their pockets. It is an error; I take care of myself in a similar way. When I go into danger — that
is, into rich people’s houses, where, in the nature of things, they will have high-tariff cigars, red-and-gilt girded
and nested in a rosewood box along with a damp sponge, cigars which develop a dismal black ash and burn down the side
and smell, and will grow hot to the fingers, and will go on growing hotter and hotter, and go on smelling more and more
infamously and unendurably the deeper the fire tunnels down inside below the thimbleful of honest tobacco that is in
the front end, the furnisher of it praising it all the time and telling you how much the deadly thing cost — yes, when
I go into that sort of peril I carry my own defense along; I carry my own brand — twenty-seven cents a barrel — and I
live to see my family again. I may seem to light his red-gartered cigar, but that is only for courtesy’s sake; I
smuggle it into my pocket for the poor, of whom I know many, and light one of my own; and while he praises it I join
in, but when he says it cost forty-five cents I say nothing, for I know better.

However, to say true, my tastes are so catholic that I have never seen any cigars that I really could not smoke,
except those that cost a dollar apiece. I have examined those and know that they are made of dog-hair, and not good
dog-hair at that.

I have a thoroughly satisfactory time in Europe, for all over the Continent one finds cigars which not even the most
hardened newsboys in New York would smoke. I brought cigars with me, the last time; I will not do that any more. In
Italy, as in France, the Government is the only cigar-peddler. Italy has three or four domestic brands: the Minghetti,
the Trabuco, the Virginia, and a very coarse one which is a modification of the Virginia. The Minghettis are large and
comely, and cost three dollars and sixty cents a hundred; I can smoke a hundred in seven days and enjoy every one of
them. The Trabucos suit me, too; I don’t remember the price. But one has to learn to like the Virginia, nobody is born
friendly to it. It looks like a rat-tail file, but smokes better, some think. It has a straw through it; you pull this
out, and it leaves a flue, otherwise there would be no draught, not even as much as there is to a nail. Some prefer a
nail at first. However, I like all the French, Swiss, German, and Italian domestic cigars, and have never cared to
inquire what they are made of; and nobody would know, anyhow, perhaps. There is even a brand of European
smoking-tobacco that I like. It is a brand used by the Italian peasants. It is loose and dry and black, and looks like
tea-grounds. When the fire is applied it expands, and climbs up and towers above the pipe, and presently tumbles off
inside of one’s vest. The tobacco itself is cheap, but it raises the insurance. It is as I remarked in the beginning —
the taste for tobacco is a matter of superstition. There are no standards — no real standards. Each man’s preference is
the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.

The Bee

It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a
business introduction earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange that I should remember a formality like that so
long; it must be nearly sixty years.

Bee scientists always speak of the bee as she. It is because all the important bees are of that sex. In the hive
there is one married bee, called the queen; she has fifty thousand children; of these, about one hundred are sons; the
rest are daughters. Some of the daughters are young maids, some are old maids, and all are virgins and remain so.

Every spring the queen comes out of the hive and flies away with one of her sons and marries him. The honeymoon
lasts only an hour or two; then the queen divorces her husband and returns home competent to lay two million eggs. This
will be enough to last the year, but not more than enough, because hundreds of bees are drowned every day, and other
hundreds are eaten by birds, and it is the queen’s business to keep the population up to standard — say, fifty
thousand. She must always have that many children on hand and efficient during the busy season, which is summer, or
winter would catch the community short of food. She lays from two thousand to three thousand eggs a day, according to
the demand; and she must exercise judgment, and not lay more than are needed in a slim flower-harvest, nor fewer than
are required in a prodigal one, or the board of directors will dethrone her and elect a queen that has more sense.

There are always a few royal heirs in stock and ready to take her place — ready and more than anxious to do it,
although she is their own mother. These girls are kept by themselves, and are regally fed and tended from birth. No
other bees get such fine food as they get, or live such a high and luxurious life. By consequence they are larger and
longer and sleeker than their working sisters. And they have a curved sting, shaped like a scimitar, while the others
have a straight one.

A common bee will sting any one or anybody, but a royalty stings royalties only. A common bee will sting and kill
another common bee, for cause, but when it is necessary to kill the queen other ways are employed. When a queen has
grown old and slack and does not lay eggs enough one of her royal daughters is allowed to come to attack her, the rest
of the bees looking on at the duel and seeing fair play. It is a duel with the curved stings. If one of the fighters
gets hard pressed and gives it up and runs, she is brought back and must try again — once, maybe twice; then, if she
runs yet once more for her life, judicial death is her portion; her children pack themselves into a ball around her
person and hold her in that compact grip two or three days, until she starves to death or is suffocated. Meantime the
victor bee is receiving royal honors and performing the one royal function — laying eggs.

As regards the ethics of the judicial assassination of the queen, that is a matter of politics, and will be
discussed later, in its proper place.

During substantially the whole of her short life of five or six years the queen lives in Egyptian darkness and
stately seclusion of the royal apartments, with none about her but plebeian servants, who give her empty lip-affection
in place of the love which her heart hungers for; who spy upon her in the interest of her waiting heirs, and report and
exaggerate her defects and deficiencies to them; who fawn upon her and flatter her to her face and slander her behind
her back; who grovel before her in the day of her power and forsake her in her age and weakness. There she sits,
friendless, upon her throne through the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies and sweet
companionship and loving endearments which she craves, by the gilded barriers of her awful rank; a forlorn exile in her
own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the
free air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade this
priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and
a cruel death — and condemned by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable!

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck — in fact, all the great authorities — are agreed in denying that the bee is a member of
the human family. I do not know why they have done this, but I think it is from dishonest motives. Why, the innumerable
facts brought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustive experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the
world, it is the bee. That seems to settle it.

But that is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the
intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy in his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief
fact of all — that his accumulation proves an entirely different thing. When you point out this miscarriage to him he
does not answer your letters; when you call to convince him, the servant prevaricates and you do not get in. Scientists
have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of them will answer your letter, but when they do they
avoid the issue — you cannot pin them down. When I discovered that the bee was human I wrote about it to all those
scientists whom I have just mentioned. For evasions, I have seen nothing to equal the answers I got.

After the queen, the personage next in importance in the hive is the virgin. The virgins are fifty thousand or one
hundred thousand in number, and they are the workers, the laborers. No work is done, in the hive or out of it, save by
them. The males do not work, the queen does no work, unless laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me. There
are only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months to finish the contract in. The distribution of work in a
hive is as cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American machine-shop or factory. A bee that has
been trained to one of the many and various industries of the concern doesn’t know how to exercise any other, and would
be offended if asked to take a hand in anything outside of her profession. She is as human as a cook; and if you should
ask the cook to wait on the table, you know what will happen. Cooks will play the piano if you like, but they draw the
line there. In my time I have asked a cook to chop wood, and I know about these things. Even the hired girl has her
frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined, even flexible, but they are there. This is not conjecture; it is
founded on the absolute. And then the butler. You ask the butler to wash the dog. It is just as I say; there is much to
be learned in these ways, without going to books. Books are very well, but books do not cover the whole domain of
esthetic human culture. Pride of profession is one of the boniest bones in existence, if not the boniest. Without doubt
it is so in the hive.

Taming the Bicycle

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the old high-wheel bicycles of that period. He wrote an
account of his experience, but did not offer it for publication. The form of bicycle he rode long ago became
antiquated, but in the humor of his pleasantry is a quality which does not grow old.

A. B. P.

I

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it. So I went down a bought a barrel of Pond’s Extract and a
bicycle. The Expert came home with me to instruct me. We chose the back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to
work.

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt — a fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight — and
skittish, like any other colt. The Expert explained the thing’s points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around
a little, to show me how easy it was to do. He said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so
we would leave that to the last. But he was in error there. He found, to his surprise and joy, that all that he needed
to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself. Although I was wholly
inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record. He was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down
with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.

We examined the machine, but it was not in the least injured. This was hardly believable. Yet the Expert assured me
that it was true; in fact, the examination proved it. I was partly to realize, then, how admirably these things are
constructed. We applied some Pond’s Extract, and resumed. The Expert got on the OTHER side to shove up this time, but I
dismounted on that side; so the result was as before.

The machine was not hurt. We oiled ourselves again, and resumed. This time the Expert took up a sheltered position
behind, but somehow or other we landed on him again.

He was full of admiration; said it was abnormal. She was all right, not a scratch on her, not a timber started
anywhere. I said it was wonderful, while we were greasing up, but he said that when I came to know these steel
spider-webs I would realize that nothing but dynamite could cripple them. Then he limped out to position, and we
resumed once more. This time the Expert took up the position of short-stop, and got a man to shove up behind. We got up
a handsome speed, and presently traversed a brick, and I went out over the top of the tiller and landed, head down, on
the instructor’s back, and saw the machine fluttering in the air between me and the sun. It was well it came down on
us, for that broke the fall, and it was not injured.

Five days later I got out and was carried down to the hospital, and found the Expert doing pretty fairly. In a few
more days I was quite sound. I attribute this to my prudence in always dismounting on something soft. Some recommend a
feather bed, but I think an Expert is better.

The Expert got out at last, brought four assistants with him. It was a good idea. These four held the graceful
cobweb upright while I climbed into the saddle; then they formed in column and marched on either side of me while the
Expert pushed behind; all hands assisted at the dismount.

The bicycle had what is called the “wabbles,” and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many
things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever
the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and
unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way. I perceived by this how radically and
grotesquely wrong had been the life-long education of my body and members. They were steeped in ignorance; they knew
nothing — nothing which it could profit them to know. For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, I put the
tiller hard down the other way, by a quite natural impulse, and so violated a law, and kept on going down. The law
required the opposite thing — the big wheel must be turned in the direction in which you are falling. It is hard to
believe this, when you are told it. And not merely hard to believe it, but impossible; it is opposed to all your
notions. And it is just as hard to do it, after you do come to believe it. Believing it, and knowing by the most
convincing proof that it is true, does not help it: you can’t any more DO it than you could before; you can neither
force nor persuade yourself to do it at first. The intellect has to come to the front, now. It has to teach the limbs
to discard their old education and adopt the new.

The steps of one’s progress are distinctly marked. At the end of each lesson he knows he has acquired something, and
he also knows what that something is, and likewise that it will stay with him. It is not like studying German, where
you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you’ve got it, they
spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No — and I see now, plainly enough, that the great pity about the
German language is, that you can’t fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend
strictly to business. But I also see, by what I have learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn
German is by the bicycling method. That is to say, take a grip on one villainy of it at a time, leaving that one half
learned.

When you have reached the point in bicycling where you can balance the machine tolerably fairly and propel it and
steer it, then comes your next task — how to mount it. You do it in this way: you hop along behind it on your right
foot, resting the other on the mounting-peg, and grasping the tiller with your hands. At the word, you rise on the peg,
stiffen your left leg, hang your other one around in the air in a general in indefinite way, lean your stomach against
the rear of the saddle, and then fall off, maybe on one side, maybe on the other; but you fall off. You get up and do
it again; and once more; and then several times.

By this time you have learned to keep your balance; and also to steer without wrenching the tiller out by the roots
(I say tiller because it IS a tiller; “handle-bar” is a lamely descriptive phrase). So you steer along, straight ahead,
a little while, then you rise forward, with a steady strain, bringing your right leg, and then your body, into the
saddle, catch your breath, fetch a violent hitch this way and then that, and down you go again.

But you have ceased to mind the going down by this time; you are getting to light on one foot or the other with
considerable certainty. Six more attempts and six more falls make you perfect. You land in the saddle comfortably, next
time, and stay there — that is, if you can be content to let your legs dangle, and leave the pedals alone a while; but
if you grab at once for the pedals, you are gone again. You soon learn to wait a little and perfect your balance before
reaching for the pedals; then the mounting-art is acquired, is complete, and a little practice will make it simple and
easy to you, though spectators ought to keep off a rod or two to one side, along at first, if you have nothing against
them.

And now you come to the voluntary dismount; you learned the other kind first of all. It is quite easy to tell one
how to do the voluntary dismount; the words are few, the requirement simple, and apparently undifficult; let your left
pedal go down till your left leg is nearly straight, turn your wheel to the left, and get off as you would from a
horse. It certainly does sound exceedingly easy; but it isn’t. I don’t know why it isn’t but it isn’t. Try as you may,
you don’t get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire. You make a spectacle of
yourself every time.

II

During the eight days I took a daily lesson an hour and a half. At the end of this twelve working-hours’
apprenticeship I was graduated — in the rough. I was pronounced competent to paddle my own bicycle without outside
help. It seems incredible, this celerity of acquirement. It takes considerably longer than that to learn
horseback-riding in the rough.

Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher, but it would have been risky for me, because of my
natural clumsiness. The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he
could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless
people into going and doing as he himself has done. There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life —
life’s “experiences” — are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of them to happen
twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side. If personal experience can be
worth anything as an education, it wouldn’t seem likely that you could trip Methuselah; and yet if that old person
could come back here it is more that likely that one of the first things he would do would be to take hold of one of
these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot. Now the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask
somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that would not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught
kind that go by experience; he would want to examine for himself. And he would find, for his instruction, that the
coiled patriarch shuns the electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too, and would leave his education in quite a
complete and rounded-out condition, till he should come again, some day, and go to bouncing a dynamite-can around to
find out what was in it.

But we wander from the point. However, get a teacher; it saves much time and Pond’s Extract.

Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform
him that I hadn’t any. He said that that was a defect which would make up-hill wheeling pretty difficult for me at
first; but he also said the bicycle would soon remove it. The contrast between his muscles and mine was quite marked.
He wanted to test mine, so I offered my biceps — which was my best. It almost made him smile. He said, “It is pulpy,
and soft, and yielding, and rounded; it evades pressure, and glides from under the fingers; in the dark a body might
think it was an oyster in a rag.” Perhaps this made me look grieved, for he added, briskly: “Oh, that’s all right, you
needn’t worry about that; in a little while you can’t tell it from a petrified kidney. Just go right along with your
practice; you’re all right.”

Then he left me, and I started out alone to seek adventures. You don’t really have to seek them — that is nothing
but a phrase — they come to you.

I chose a reposeful Sabbath-day sort of a back street which was about thirty yards wide between the curbstones. I
knew it was not wide enough; still, I thought that by keeping strict watch and wasting no space unnecessarily I could
crowd through.

Of course I had trouble mounting the machine, entirely on my own responsibility, with no encouraging moral support
from the outside, no sympathetic instructor to say, “Good! now you’re doing well — good again — don’t hurry — there,
now, you’re all right — brace up, go ahead.” In place of this I had some other support. This was a boy, who was perched
on a gate-post munching a hunk of maple sugar.

He was full of interest and comment. The first time I failed and went down he said that if he was me he would dress
up in pillows, that’s what he would do. The next time I went down he advised me to go and learn to ride a tricycle
first. The third time I collapsed he said he didn’t believe I could stay on a horse-car. But the next time I succeeded,
and got clumsily under way in a weaving, tottering, uncertain fashion, and occupying pretty much all of the street. My
slow and lumbering gait filled the boy to the chin with scorn, and he sung out, “My, but don’t he rip along!” Then he
got down from his post and loafed along the sidewalk, still observing and occasionally commenting. Presently he dropped
into my wake and followed along behind. A little girl passed by, balancing a wash-board on her head, and giggled, and
seemed about to make a remark, but the boy said, rebukingly, “Let him alone, he’s going to a funeral.”

I have been familiar with that street for years, and had always supposed it was a dead level; but it was not, as the
bicycle now informed me, to my surprise. The bicycle, in the hands of a novice, is as alert and acute as a spirit-level
in the detecting the delicate and vanishing shades of difference in these matters. It notices a rise where your
untrained eye would not observe that one existed; it notices any decline which water will run down. I was toiling up a
slight rise, but was not aware of it. It made me tug and pant and perspire; and still, labor as I might, the machine
came almost to a standstill every little while. At such times the boy would say: “That’s it! take a rest — there ain’t
no hurry. They can’t hold the funeral without YOU.”

Stones were a bother to me. Even the smallest ones gave me a panic when I went over them. I could hit any kind of a
stone, no matter how small, if I tried to miss it; and of course at first I couldn’t help trying to do that. It is but
natural. It is part of the ass that is put in us all, for some inscrutable reason.

It was at the end of my course, at last, and it was necessary for me to round to. This is not a pleasant thing, when
you undertake it for the first time on your own responsibility, and neither is it likely to succeed. Your confidence
oozes away, you fill steadily up with nameless apprehensions, every fiber of you is tense with a watchful strain, you
start a cautious and gradual curve, but your squirmy nerves are all full of electric anxieties, so the curve is quickly
demoralized into a jerky and perilous zigzag; then suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes
slanting for the curbstone, defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind — your heart stands still, your
breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work, straight on you go, and there are but a couple of feet between you and the
curb now. And now is the desperate moment, the last chance to save yourself; of course all your instructions fly out of
your head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY from the curb instead of TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that
granite-bound inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my experience. I dragged myself out from under the
indestructible bicycle and sat down on the curb to examine.

I started on the return trip. It was now that I saw a farmer’s wagon poking along down toward me, loaded with
cabbages. If I needed anything to perfect the precariousness of my steering, it was just that. The farmer was occupying
the middle of the road with his wagon, leaving barely fourteen or fifteen yards of space on either side. I couldn’t
shout at him — a beginner can’t shout; if he opens his mouth he is gone; he must keep all his attention on his
business. But in this grisly emergency, the boy came to the rescue, and for once I had to be grateful to him. He kept a
sharp lookout on the swiftly varying impulses and inspirations of my bicycle, and shouted to the man accordingly:

“To the left! Turn to the left, or this jackass ‘ll run over you!” The man started to do it. “No, to the right, to
the right! Hold on! THAT won’t do! — to the left! — to the right! — to the LEFT— right! left — ri — Stay where you ARE,
or you’re a goner!”

And just then I caught the off horse in the starboard and went down in a pile. I said, “Hang it! Couldn’t you SEE I
was coming?”

“Yes, I see you was coming, but I couldn’t tell which WAY you was coming. Nobody could — now, COULD they? You
couldn’t yourself — now, COULD you? So what could I do?”

There was something in that, and so I had the magnanimity to say so. I said I was no doubt as much to blame as he
was.

Within the next five days I achieved so much progress that the boy couldn’t keep up with me. He had to go back to
his gate-post, and content himself with watching me fall at long range.

There was a row of low stepping-stones across one end of the street, a measured yard apart. Even after I got so I
could steer pretty fairly I was so afraid of those stones that I always hit them. They gave me the worst falls I ever
got in that street, except those which I got from dogs. I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run
over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true: but I think that the
reason he couldn’t run over the dog was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran over
every dog that came along. I think it makes a great deal of difference. If you try to run over the dog he knows how to
calculate, but if you are trying to miss him he does not know how to calculate, and is liable to jump the wrong way
every time. It was always so in my experience. Even when I could not hit a wagon I could hit a dog that came to see me
practice. They all liked to see me practice, and they all came, for there was very little going on in our neighborhood
to entertain a dog. It took time to learn to miss a dog, but I achieved even that.

I can steer as well as I want to, now, and I will catch that boy one of these days and run over HIM if he doesn’t
reform.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.

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